To the Last
by unnafraher
Summary: The story of how - - and why - - Lin and Tenzin love each other. Chapter nine: In which Lin treats Tenzin and herself, dances, reassembles the team, and then gets her scars. Trigger warning. .:Lin Beifong and Tenzin-centric:.
1. Prologue

When Tenzin turns to question her, he is already far too late. By the time that he has processed her command, she has almost gone.

But the look that she gives him is enough to tell him.

She says nothing else. He wouldn't have heard her anyway, not with the wind in his ears and the sudden overwhelming rushing in his head—things flying intangible between coherent thoughts he grips at, disbelief, a relationship that is, should've been, and wasn't as sturdy as the earth. An affection as delicious and light and right as a crisp breeze on a hot day.

She says nothing, but Lin Beifong looks at him, and he realises that she isn't just looking at him, she is looking at him and his family and what she sees is the last of the airbenders.

He understands what she means with this look. Honour and duty are both things that are profoundly important to them. Even if he and Lin have been hot-tempered, they are both moral people. She is simple, like him. (Though he has not always understood Lin, and she has not always been so simple. Like when she was a woman that he _loved_ and was loved by, when they were younger and their responsibilities had not been quite so settled on their shoulders.) She is utterly trusted.

The intensity of this moment, stretching longer and longer, shakes loose memories he doesn't want.

He has always been able to read Lin's eyes. Such lovely lively livid eyes, he has thought in his time.

And then she is gone, yanked away from Oogi by the cables she set loose, torn definitely away by the only decision she would have made.

He can't think, but he understands. He watches the carnage she unleashes on the first ship. He holds his breath when she jumps to the second, and then he feels when the lightening burns through her body and down along her spine out to the ends of her, blue fury rages through veins and nerves to overwhelm her, a stream that courses and courses and coils until it's too much and all has to go black. His hands twitch involuntarily, and the pain burns bright in his stomach and his mind is flooded with memories overly vivid in a white-hot way. These are memories that he needs to dismiss away _now_.

The pain abates.

Then he turns to his family. His responsibility, his life.

His older son Meelo looks truly forlorn for the first time in his young life. "That lady is my hero," Meelo says.

"Yes," Tenzin says, looking down. "She is."

And even Pema doesn't know how true that is.

**…**

When Lin Beifong celebrated the tenth New Year of her life, she moved in with her 'Uncle' Avatar Aang.

One week after Lin's arrival to Air Temple Island, Tenzin was found sleeping with her. Katara discovered her youngest son in the thin dun pre-dawn light, when she had come into Lin's room to check on whether or not Lin had managed to drift to sleep. Her poor niece had been plagued by a torturous combination of night terrors and insomnia, resulting in a lack of sleep Katara suspected had something to do with the girl's waning complexion and deteriorating health.

Katara had not expected to find two small bundles huddled closely together under the blankets and covers, so close together that they almost looked like an adult drawn into a fetal position. But she easily recognised the unruly brown crown of Tenzin unshaven hair.

Katara had walked closer to the bed. She had watched the two of them closely as a mother does, noticing the synchronised tiny rises and falls of their chests, the outlines suggesting that Tenzin's arm was wrapped around Lin's torso and shoulders, while also on the lookout for any signs of faking. Eventually she found that no signs were forthcoming. She judged the two children genuinely asleep.

She had smiled to herself, resigned for this morning. Her son would not be allowed to make a habit of sneaking into the women's quarters in the dead of night; he would have to be talked to about that. In fifteen minutes, too, Tenzin would be late for meditation with his father for the first since he had contracted measelwarts at the age of seven; Aang, her husband, would have to be talked to about that.

"I can convince him this time," Katara whispered softly, bending down over the bed, settling her hand on her son's shoulder through the white blankets. "But I can't make excuses for you. I won't. Your father wouldn't want that, you know, and neither do I. Neither would you, I think."

She had kissed her son's forehead, and after a moment of gazing fondly at him she had leaned over further and had kissed Lin's forehead too. Spirits help her—Katara had seen it coming, was _still_ seeing it coming, but actually _seeing _Tenzin's friendly affection for Lin developing into a crush on Lin left Katara feeling restless for many reasons.

She had sighed as she pulled away from the two sleeping children, moving quiet and easy through the still-dark room as a koi moves beneath the surface of calmed water at night. Try as she might, she could not imagine an airbender with the temperament of a Toph. Though maybe there was hope. After all, Tenzin was more serious and more mature at age eleven than his fifteen and seventeen year old siblings were put together.

But then, Toph really had gotten better as she had aged, as she had taken on responsibility after responsibility until the load on her shoulders alone was more than impressive. There had been a lot of responsibilities, from her devotion to her city, to her daughter, to the defense she kept up to keep her child safe. At one point there had been one person there to share her personal load with, but that time had passed so quickly that none of her friends really had appreciated it _was _a time in her life until it was over. After that there had been someone else who had finally made it into Toph's life, but then that arrangement simply hadn't worked out in time. And that hadn't been fair or easy for any of them.

"You will never be alone, at least," Katara had muttered lovingly to the room.

After Katara slid the paper-panelled doors shut, she contemplated what brazier she might move into Lin's room, and what could serve for a good wholesome breakfast. Back in the room behind her, Lin rolled in closer to Tenzin because he was a source of warmth. Lin was dreaming that her mother's shade had lingered over her, both far and close at the same time. The shade had begun to enervate her. It sucked away all of her vital heat even as it was desperate to comfort her.

.

Tenzin had woken up with a start. For a moment he had been frantic, his confusion ripping through his usual grogginess and jerking him awake faster than anything could otherwise hope to rouse him. He had twisted around in bed, then whipped back around to orientate himself.

Then his eyes settled on Lin who was lying beside him. Lin who was frowning into the palm of one of her hands, who had just been locked tightly against him, who was still immured in a dream.

Tenzin had had no idea what to do. On one hand, he wanted to smile and feel proud and tell Lin that he had helped her get some proper sleep. Finally. On the other hand, he was sure that he had overslept himself because he could discern _colours_ in the room.

That meant that it was past dawn.

Completely forgetting his lesson, he had flushed and thought to himself, _I am going to get caught in the female sleeping quarters and my mom's going to kill me and Bumi's never going to let me live it down and—_

Lin had then whimpered quietly, her eyebrows had twitched in stress. She had tried to bury her face into her pillow.

Tenzin had held his breath, suddenly absolutely transfixed on her.

Then she had whimpered, again.

"Lin?" Tenzin had whispered softly, softly. He had reached out an arm tentatively, centimetre by centimetre, until he lightly touched her shoulder and shook her once.

"Lin?"

This time her eyes had crept open. He had earned a response of, "Who?"

"Me. Tenzin."

"Tenzin," Lin repeated as she sat up. It took several moments of staring at him and blinking away her sleep, her green eyes becoming clearer and clearer, until she had remembered. "Tenzin. Right. Sleeping. Thanks. You're gonna get in trouble, Airhead."

"W-what? Ssssh, you're not going to tell on me. You can't. I helped you."

"You still broke the rules, though," Lin had pointed out, yawning. "Auntie is gonna turn you into seal jerky."

"That's stupid," Tenzin had rasped, narrowing his eyes at Lin. "This is a vegetarian island."

"What about when ya guys go to the South Pole again? And if she loves ya too much to do it, there's your grandfather."

"That's not helping, Lin!"

"Fine, fine," Lin had said and had yawned again, this time yawning into her hand before waving it dismissively at Tenzin. "Don't lose your loincloth in a twister."

Tenzin had sighed most prodigiously, sounding for all the world like a world-weary, put-upon adult. Lin had rolled her eyes as she crawled over Tenzin, touched her bare feet to the wooden floorboards, shivered for a moment, and then beckoned Tenzin to get out of bed. Together they had yanked one of the sheets off of the bed. For a moment the sheet had looked like a half-full parachute lazing in its descent before it fell and covered them.

"Stay close to me, okay, Tenzin? And walk on your own feet, not mine."

Tenzin wrapped his arms around Lin's waist, and beneath the sheet they had plenty warmth between the heat radiating from their small bodies and the heat still trapped in the cotton threads. After drawing the sheet closer to themselves, Tenzin ducked his head and bent his back and they headed out like that, with Lin in front as the head and Tenzin in back as the rear-end.

They had not closed the door behind them. Together she and Tenzin had shambled down the hallway, had taken several wrong turns ("Seismic sense doesn't work on wood, idiot! It's _seismic _sense."), and had almost gone down to the basement before they were within sight of the entrance to the courtyard.

Then an acolyte had spotted them. Or rather, he had spotted a hunchbacked ghost in this young new temple, padding along and having hushed, clipped arguments with itself.

While the acolyte had paused and remained paralysed, trying to work out if this presence was a demon, omen, sign, ghost, a threat, shade, or brain malfunction, Lin had acted.

"You are seeing me in a dream," she announced in her deepest, gruffest voice. She had also almost laughed because she thought to herself that she sounded manlier than Tenzin ever would. "Go back to bed, and wake. You have overslept, and you have duties you must attend to. For shame."

Tenzin hadn't actually seen what had happened, but he had heard the acolyte's retreating footsteps.

After that, the rest had been easy. They didn't fight anymore, and Tenzin figured out how to follow Lin's strange, hurried pace without either falling behind or stepping on her heels. (That latter had been particularly deadly, because Lin had a Thing about her feet being touched, so sensitive and ticklish was she.)

And when they were outside and had thrown off the sheet, Lin smiled at Tenzin despite her grouching and complaining of his incompetence and worthlessness as an airbender, if he really was as heavy-footed as he seemed to be.

"Thanks, Tenzin."

"…You're welcome, Lin. Really. And thanks for helping me. It was—It was my fault for, you know, forgetting about the whole living in the girls' side. But we did okay together."

"You're kind of a chump," Lin had said, smiling still, though her smile had tightened into a smirk. And though she looked better smirking than she had looked frowning, Tenzin had thought that she looked nicest when she was simply smiling. In fact, he had thought, _She looks nice when she's smiling at me, and happy._

He had flushed, but he was saved by a sudden rush of sunlight flaring across the courtyard and into their eyes. Just then the sun had burst over the peaks of the snowy mountains behind Avatar Aang's Republic City and flooded their world with light and more colour. Lin had shielded her eyes and looked to see the sunrise for a moment, while Tenzin had kept his eyes on her and thought about how goofy her bedhead looked.

"Well, I should go back," Lin said. "You know. Sleep until breakfast. Have fun with Uncle Aang."

But before Lin had turned around, Tenzin had held up his hand just as suddenly as the sunburst had come, and for the first time that Lin would ever be able to recall, Tenzin leaned in towards her in such a way that could be called properly conspiratorial.

Lin had been very happy.

"The next time you can't—when you can't sleep and you're cold, find me. I'll take you down to the sky bison caves, okay? We can sleep on Oogi or Appa. They're warm, and technically they're not on either the boys' or girls' side."

Lin had nodded, and laughed. "Hah! Fine. I'll remember that, Tenzin."

And with that, Lin had disappeared on swift feet, moving too easily for someone whose natural affinity wasn't air.


	2. 1

Toph Beifong relocated to Republic City before her daughter was old enough to remember the move. Increasingly renowned for her metalbending capabilities and her capable metalbending students, Avatar Aang had personally invited Toph to the City, offering her the position of Chief of Police. It was well known that Aang was interested in exploring new styles of policing the city's inevitable, regrettable, insatiable criminal element. Several major cities in the world had already adopted metalbending police forces—and had founded their own metalbending academies—under the direct oversight of the mother of metalbending.

These police forces were known for being clean, efficient, fair, and disciplined. It seemed that no matter where she was or how old she had become, Toph Beifong had a prodigious talent for shouting people into shape.

Toph had been greatly pleased and flattered by the Avatar's invitation, and she said that her daughter would now have a perfect position to aim for if she grew up seeing her mother in action. Of course it was only natural that she was asked to fill the position, Toph also had said, and of course only her marvelous powers would serve.

Toph moved for other reasons that were also on behalf of her daughter. If the girl's father insisted on stalking her to Republic City, Toph could and would finally have the authority to toss his butt into jail. Up until then he had been so good at being a sneak, there was not enough proof to have him convicted, and his family's money and influence hadn't exactly hurt his innocence either. Her own family was also insisting that she come to Gaoling; though they couldn't force the Great Toph Beifong to do anything she didn't expressly want to do, they were getting better and better at applying more pressure on her, and at being more annoying. They were getting older, feeling acutely what their lack of an heir would soon entail. As she saw it, she wouldn't be around to be bending any graves for them.

Also, Toph's daughter was an earthbender. Staying in one spot, being ___stable_, would certainly make her training easier. Lin would flourish.

So they had moved. And, soon enough, their moving had more positive consequences for both of them than Toph had hoped for.

It was nice for Toph to have her longtime friends back in her life. Loneliness never had been a problem in the years that she had been away, but once she was no longer without her friends, she realised how profoundly alone she had been without them.

And the first time Sokka had greeted her, with so much audible feeling, her heart had hurt, her chest had hurt. Her face had hurt because she smiled so much as he hugged her.

"Jeez, it's not like I ever said I wasn't going to see you again," Toph had said when she pulled back from Sokka. She made a show of straightening her green and brown cotton tunic. "You didn't have to miss me that much, or pretend as though you did."

"It's been a long time, Toph," Sokka had said, and both of them had been aware of the warmth of his hand on her arm, his long fingers wrapped fondly around her shoulder.

"I guess it really has been," she had said, thinking of the beloved and beautiful two year old girl she now had along with her.

Things had had enough time to change; for one, there was no longer only one airbender in the world. And the stakes for all them were now different.

.

Sokka was so fond of Lin that anyone who saw them together did not think to doubt that she was his daughter. People who did not know him or his history thought of him, What a cool dad he is. People who knew him and his history thought, Has he returned to a childhood sweetheart, and had a sweetheart with her? Sokka's father was proud of his son, and often joked that Sokka had snagged himself a woman noble enough to correspond to his princely status, finally.

Sokka was expecting a joke somewhere along those lines that day, if today were to be the day that his father finally made it back from visiting with family in the Northern Water Tribe. Unseasonably cold autumn weather in the north had created enough ice to cause problems.

Together, he and Lin had come down to the harbour to watch the shipping traffic. Lin had no schooling this Saturday, and Toph was working through the weekend down at the station.

They stood on the quayside, back just enough so that Lin was out of the range of the cold, sparkling spray that came up off of the water because of the wind. Sokka kept a tight grip on Lin's hand, partially loving, very well aware that Lin was a little spitfire who was bound to chase off after something interesting unless she were held in place by her mother's iron boundaries. And these were pure iron boundaries, Sokka would joke to himself, because ___Lin cannot bend them yet_.

The little girl was very well-behaved though, very much taken by the interesting sights. News ships came in practically every three or four minutes. They excited her young imagination with stories she made up for each one, tales about possible treasures and secrets the ships might've carried. She was bundled up in a thick blue fur-lined coat that Sokka had given her. Lin loved the coat for its softness and coziness, and Toph was delighted by it because of its blue colour, and by the knowledge that her daughter appeared as if she could have had parents who hailed from anywhere. This pleased Toph, even if she couldn't see Lin for herself.

At one point Lin pulled on Sokka's hand. He looked down at her. She looked up at him, very serious.

"Sokka?"

"Yes, Lin?"

"When I'm fifteen, will you please take me icedodging?"

Sokka smiled and laughed, growing proud, both of his heritage and of Lin. "So, you think you'll be tough enough for that rite of passage? It's a hard one, you know."

"Hah! I'm definitely tough enough! Mama said that if I could do it, I could be a member of the Water Tribe with you," Lin said.

Sokka got down on one knee, leveling his eyes with Lin's. He patted her head once, and her shoulder once. "Well, my brave little warrior, we'll just have to see when you're fifteen if you have the stuff for the Water Tribe."

Lin leaned forward, some of her loose, windblown hair falling into her eyes. She looked like her mother. "Really?"

"It's a promise."

"All right, yes!" Lin hugged him excitedly then, and then pulled back to punch him in the shoulder. "You better not be lying."

And he wasn't—he meant it. Having Lin so interested in Water Tribe culture was a pleasure, especially when it meant that he could tell her all the long, hyperbole-ridden stories of his raids and adventures in the South Pole. Those entertained her for hours. She also took an endearing liking to his traditional and time-honoured weapon, Boomerang. That it actually ___did_ come back with absolutely no use of bending was fascinating, and fun.

One ship that they saw that day happened to be Southern Water Tribe, but it was not one of the ships Sokka was expecting and hoping to see. Seeing it did remind Lin of her decision to one day board one and travel to the South Pole on her own, if Sokka and Auntie Katara didn't take her, or if she didn't sign onto a pirate ship first. No matter what, she was going eventually. Whether or not that was with family, it didn't effect the reality that she ___would_ go.

When by the afternoon no hoped-for ships had appeared, Sokka sighed to himself, disappointed, feeling that vague, nagging worry for loved ones still at sea. He and Lin rambled around downtown for a while. He let her pick out where she wanted to go, meaning a short trip to the park and a shop selling armour like her mother's, a definite favourite spot of hers.

Then Sokka took advantage of the Southern Water Tribe tone of the day and suggested that they go eat at a restaurant serving traditional dishes at the edge of the city. The restaurant sat on a vantage point near the base of one of the encircling snow-capped mountains, with a view of the bay that he was a fan of. The sun would be setting shortly, too, so they would have a view of the vast cityscape bathed in twilight, of the windows sparkling with pink and orange and red light.

Lin agreed that eating there would be a pretty great idea.

.

The two of them had a good meal, both ordering meat-centric dishes. That was another thing that endeared her to him: she liked meat. Not just liked it, she loved eating it. Loved the way it tasted, loved the way that she could play with it and sometimes get away with having juices running down her chin at the dinner table with her mom, loved when her mom couldn't see her lack of manners and Sokka just laughed.

Though fog had started to settle in on the bay, Lin could still see Air Temple Island. Several times through the meal she imagined Uncle Aang and Auntie Katara sitting down to dinner with their own kids. She also looked out at the city, and said, "My mom's out there right now, beating up some bad guys."

"Yes, she definitely is," Sokka said.

"She's really strong, you know," Lin said, crossing her arms. Talking about how awesome and strong her mom was was one of her favourite topics of conversation at the table.

Though it didn't exactly count as bragging because everything that she said was true. "Yes, your mom is that. She's the greatest earthbender, you know, and it's really quite awesome how she single-handedly invented metalbending." Sokka smiled.

"Hmm, yeah. That's why she can't be with me all the time. She said she wants to be really, really badly. But I understand," Lin added. Then she turned back to her meal. She picked up a vegetable garnish on her plate, examined it, shuddered disgustedly at it, flicked it across the table at Sokka.

"Lin, you know," Sokka said. He stopped for a moment to look at her and make sure that he had her full attention. "You know, your mom loves you a lot."

"I know."

"I love you, too."

"Yeah, I know that, too." Lin said. She rolled her eyes. Sokka laughed once at that, remembering all of Toph's failed attempts at that simple, exasperated gesture. "It's pretty obvious." Lin sounded positively bored. ___Like mother, like daughter. _It's nice, Sokka thought fleetingly, dealing with a whole family not that great at being emotionally complicated.

Sokka said, "Well, your mom and I have been thinking about seeing each other—"

"But she's blind. How many times do you have to be reminded of that, Sokka?" Lin groaned, happy to adopt her mother's long-standing exasperation with him.

"Well, you—Sorry. What I meant is, Toph and I have thought about spending time together—more time together." Sokka paused, smiling at her before he continued. "And you're lucky! You'd get to hang out a lot me. I was wondering, would you want that?"

"I know." Lin's head was slightly cocked. And then she had said, "What I want is to know, when do I get to call you dad?"

**…**

The first time that Lin gets to visit her family on Air Temple Island on her own, the only people she can visit with are Katara, Tenzin, and stupidhead Bumi. All three are waiting on the quayside to greet her, though Bumi seems more interested in his little brother than her, with a glow about him that suggests he's got a prank thought out. Lin thinks that if Bumi wants to shove Tenzin into Yue Bay, then Bumi is going to get his butt kicked over the moon.

But everything ends up pleasant. Katara hugs her and Bumi hugs her too, and Tenzin bows to her so Lin bows back.

Then, because she can, she rolls her eyes at him and tackles him. "You're too serious," she says, and before Tenzin can say anything back Bumi hugs them both, and the three of them end up racing up to the Air Temple compound.

Katara smiles and follows closely after, forty-three years old.

When the kids get to the top of the hill Bumi remembers that he has to practise earthbending forms. So he goes off to practise so that he can get them down before his dad comes home. He says, "I'll smell ya later," to Lin, though he doesn't think that Lin has any particular scent to smell, appealing or otherwise.

Lin brushes her hair out of her face and says to Tenzin, "So. What are we doing to do today?"

"I don't know."

"Do I get to pick, then?"

"No," Tenzin says, pouting a bit. "No, you don't get to pick because you picked what we did the last three times you were here."

"Well yeah, because just 'meditating' for hours isn't doing something, Airhead. We should climb trees today."

"We did that before, though."

"Yeah, but how many trees have you got on this island? More than a thousand, I bet."

Tenzin says, "Father said he's planted more than five thousand. And Bumi and Kya and I've planted some too."

Lin smiles. "Do you think I may plant one, too?"

"You should ask Father. I am sure that he would say yes." Tenzin nods. He then notices that Lin's gaze has gone from him to the Air Temple to the large padoga on top.

They look at each other, and Tenzin can feel that Lin wants still go climbing today, but climbing somewhere she hasn't climbed before. Lin touches her hair again, pushing back more drifts that have gotten out of the plait her mother or someone worked her hair into this morning. It's a nice plait, but not enough time was spent on it to make sure that it was woven tight and neat. Lin scratches her neck.

"The only people aloud to go up there are people who belong to the Air Nomads," Tenzin says.

So Lin smiles and takes his hand and says, "Lead the way, Your Airiness."

Tenzin obviously can't see any reason not to, for he leads her into the paper-and-wood temple. The ceiling opens high over them, and there is plenty of room for air in here. Several scrolls hang on the walls with Air Nomad sayings and teachings painted in delicate, light characters. Some of the scolls bear the triple swirl insignia of the Air Nation, too. It's a symbol that makes Lin a little bit proud when she sees it, proud for the two airbenders and proud to be family and friends with them, too.

And here she is, being led up to the highest point in the newest Air Temple. On each storey they stop long enough to look out at the bay and the city and the mountains that seem to be getting shorter the higher they climb. When they are on the top storey Lin says, "Let's go all the way," so they climb one storey higher than the attic and go up onto the roof.

The view is magnificent. They can see the city and mountains still, but in the other direction the sea stretches out so wide that Lin figures that some of the water she is seeing is the Mong Ce sea. She has never crossed the sea. Because of her mom and her condition, Lin has only ever travelled by land. Her mom hates ships because she is completely blind on them unless they are made of metal, and even then she's only able to see as far as the ships extends. Though she has this hateful aversion to ships, she often tells Lin of the times she travelled on Appa and explained that air travel isn't that all bad, once you get used to it.

And that's one thing that Tenzin has that she doesn't. Air, and the freedom of it.

"It's really nice up here," Tenzin says.

He moves to take a step forward. Lin grabs out and latches onto his arm, drags him to a halt

"Don't look at me like that, Airhead. It's just—high."

"If I fall I'll be all right, Lin," Tenzin says. He tries to shrugs off her grip. He sometimes does find that Lin can be overbearing or over-controlling, but when she doesn't let go and only grips his limb tighter, he's quick to realise that this is about something else.

She is looking down, eyes glued to the pretty blue tiles bright in the afternoon light.

Lin is not afraid of heights. She is afraid of being unsecured.

"Lin," Tenzin prompts, moving to hold her hand. He smiles at her when she looks at him. She blinks hard, but she no longer seems scared enough to have scattered wits.

"Thanks, Tenzin."

"Sure. Though next time, you ought to think a bit before going somewhere." Tenzin frowns. "And don't come up here without me."

"Would you like me to push you off this tower?"

"And then how would you get down, Lin?"

Without letting go of his hand, Lin shoves him a bit and waves her other hand dismissively at him, but otherwise Tenzin wins ___that _point. "Hnnn. I was going to ask if I could go travelling with you by air, but I don't think so anymore. I'd probably die of boredom, if you didn't drop out of the sky first."

And Tenzin frowns again. "What! That's not fair at all."

"Maybe," Lin says before shrugging. She sits down and pulls Tenzin down after her. He stumbles a bit but is happy to simply sit next to her once they are settled.

He thinks about it for a while, thinks about his adventures to the South Pole, and about the other adventures around the world that his father has promised he will take him on one day soon. Tenzin asks, "Would you really not like to go on a journey with me?"

Looking at him over her shoulder, Lin shakes her head. "Nah. It'd be fun, I think. But you'll have to ask me. I'd say yes, though." She pauses. Smiles. "Probably."

"Good," Tenzin says, and that's that for a while. They sit there for a time, shoulder to shoulder, hand in hand. A breeze picks up, dies down. Lin starts to drift to sleep.

But eventually Tenzin thinks that his mother might wonder where he is or need him, so he and Lin descend from the roof. Halfway down, out of the window they see two sky bison approaching the island. That must be Aang, though he is home rather really. Too early, as it is.

"Something isn't right," Lin says, and Tenzin tells her they need to hurry.

No-one had been looking for them, they find out. When they reach the courtyard Aang is there. But so are Sokka and Toph and several others, all of them bent and twisted in strange marionette poses. Lin's mother isn't a puppet though, so that can't actually be her.

Lin goes white. Tenzin is confused, too. He holds onto Lin's shoulder as his father comes up to them and falls to one knee and his deeply scarlet cloak flutters around both his son and Lin.

She looks up and Aang says, "Something's happened."


	3. 2

That is just the start of it. Avatar Aang reaches out and puts his hand on Lin's shoulder. His bald head blocks the sun from Lin's face so that she could look at him if she wanted to, but where wants to look is over Aang's shoulder. The scene behind him is chaotic, it is confusion in motion. Several Air Acolytes are trying to unload the limp acolyte who she knows serves as the Air Nation councilman and is supposed to be at work this very moment. Several other acolytes are working with Katara. They have already unloaded Sokka; he is lying on the grey stone walkway.

What is holding them up is Lin's mother. Or—the weight of her is slowing them down. It takes the concerted effort of six puffing and heaving acolytes to get her, armour and all, down from Appa's back. Then they put her down on the ground, and she is lying very very still next to Sokka on the grey stone walkway.

All of the commotion and shouting has spooked the sky bison, but two acolytes are actively soothing them. They are patting their furry heads, whispering things to them that Lin cannot hear from where she is standing.

But Aang is trying to say things to her.

"Lin," he tries again, bringing their faces closer. "Listen to me, okay? Something's happened, but your mother is going to be all right."

Lin looks into his face. For a moment she looks nothing but blank. That is concerning because it seems as though she's shut down so much, so suddenly, she is unable to process enough of what is happening around her to be confused, let alone scared or shattered.

But then she knits her brow and steps to the side, trying to shrug away both Aang and Tenzin. "What about my dad?"

"Sokka will be okay, too," Aang adds. He leans forward and tries to block Lin, but she is intent on the scene behind him even if she can't make it past him.

Suddenly, Lin halts. She stares into Aang's face again and says slowly, softly, "I want to see them."

"Not now."

"Please."

A beat. It hurts, but Aang shakes his head and stands up. "It's not going to be easy, Lin, but be patient. Right now your mother and Sokka need you to be brave for a while. They'll be better really soon. Until then, Tenzin will stay with you, okay?" Aang prompts, and he smiles down at her and then looks to his son.

The boy and his father say nothing to each other. But Tenzin understands. He will stay with Lin. For now, he will be her strength.

When Lin says nothing else, Aang turns around on his heel, his scarlet cloak sweeping, and he walks over to join his wife. They talk for a few moments. Lin can't hear them because of the buzzing in her head, and really she can't hear anything else but the footsteps making the ground vibrate, and the vibrations are travelling up her legs and ringing achingly through her entire body. She watches as acolytes lift up her mother and Sokka. She doesn't understand how her parents' limbs could flop around so raggedly even if they _are_ asleep.

Katara leads the acolytes and they take Toph and Sokka into the female dormitory. Aang follows behind the last acolyte, and the whole time no-one spares Lin or Tenzin a glance.

Then suddenly the earth is too quiet and the courtyard is too quiet. Lin can hear her heartbeat and it is so loud she has to crouch down, otherwise she will explode.

Lin screams, though she quickly shuts up because she is afraid that she will lose her voice. She needs to save it for talking with her mother and father when they wake up. They will be waking up in a bit.

As she cries, Tenzin is on his haunches beside her, all the while stroking her back, sometimes even travelling in circles up to her shoulders. After a while he says very softly, "Lin?"

"Mm?" She doesn't look up at him, only looks down at where her tears have slightly dampened the earth.

"I was just checking," he says, and it is obvious that he does not expect her to say anything else. That he would not force her to say anything else, or answer to the stupid question, "Are you okay?" He knows how much _that_ makes her crazy.

Lin sits down in the dirt and Tenzin joins her.

Eventually a while has passed, and a younger female Air Acolyte comes out to get them. She gestures to Lin and says, "You may come and see your mother, now."

Lin stands up and dusts the dirt off of her bottom. She looks at Tenzin and waits until he has done the same. Then Lin nods to the acolyte and says, "Okay." She and Tenzin follow after the acolyte, and when the two of them are left alone outside of a closed door, Lin says to Tenzin, "Thanks for staying with me."

Tenzin says, "You're welcome. I'll be here until you don't need me anymore." He does not leave her yet.

She nods at him, and he takes that to mean that he can go in with her. He is worried for his uncle, too.

.

For the first few seconds, Lin isn't sure whether or not her mother is going to cry. If Toph cries then there's no way that Lin's going to be able to hold in her own tears and that would be hard on the both of them. But her mom doesn't cry, she shoots up in bed and looks directly at where the door is, though her eyes neither land nor focus on Lin. But Lin is used to that.

Katara, sitting on a chair drawn up close to Toph's bed, puts her hand on Toph's.

"Lin, is that you?" Toph asks.

"It is, mommy, it's me" Lin says, and there is no stopping her from running over the wooden floor and lunging at her mother. Mother and daughter huddle together. Toph draws Lin to her chest and cradles her there, digging her nose into the girl's black locks that she has been told are identical to her own.

"Lin. My little Lin," Toph whispers. Only Lin can hear her.

While they rock back and forth, back and forth for a while, Tenzin approaches the bed and stands by his mother. She smiles wearily at her serious son, and for a moment she is achingly proud, relieved, and worried.

"Mother?" he asks, looking up at her.

"Your uncle will be all right too, Tenzin." She looks over her shoulder at her brother. "He just needs some time to rest." Frankly she is baffled that Toph is awake at this moment, let alone strong enough to sit up on her own and cling to her daughter with one hand as she is. It probably is borrowed strength: a mother's desperation to see that her child is safe. What wouldn't surprise Katara is if Toph paid for this later with a deeper sleep lasting longer than Sokka's.

For now though, Toph is clinging to her daughter until Lin pulls back and looks up at her mother. Lin snuggles up to her again, but she keeps enough room between them so that she can touch her mother's hair and face. She touches her nose, her temple, her mouth, pushes some long bangs out of her cataracted, glazed eyes. "Mom, what happened?" Lin finally asks.

Toph leans into her daughter, rests her chin on the crown of her little head. "There was a bad guy who tried to get me. He tried to get Sokka, too."

"What about the Air Nation councilman? Did he get hurt, too?"

"Yes. The bad guy got all of us, but your Uncle Aang got him and beat him up."

Lin frowns slightly, and she feels Tenzin's puzzled look behind her. "But Uncle Aang doesn't believe in beating people up. That's against his religion."

Toph laughs, once. "It's not against his religion exactly, my little princess. Aang took the bad guy's bending away."

And then Lin gasps, shuddering. To have bending taken away—Lin tries to imagine it, and the thought is so scary, the feeling so _empty, _she pushes herself in closer to her mother. But Lin doesn't realise that Toph has been trying to protect her right arm and the right side of her body. Lin's weight before had only made Toph clench her teeth, but the sudden, swiftly shifting of weight is too much. It increases the pressure on her wrecked body so much that the gasps and grimaces Toph has been holding back escape as a shriek.

Lin stills, horrified.

"Mommy? Are you still hurt?"

Toph smiles and moves, but when she tries to joke and alleviate her daughter's fear, she groans and this time is down for the count.

.

Having Lin stay on the island that night is not at all in question. Though Lin still asks Katara very sweetly, very subdued, if she might stay the night with them. Her mother is here, after all, and so is Sokka too, and she really would like to be able to stay with them until they wake up.

"Of course, Lin," Katara says, smiling down at the girl. "You wouldn't expect us to kick you off, I hope."

To that Lin just shrugs and asks, "May I have a sleepover with Tenzin? All the other kids I know in the city have them." She doesn't bring up Kya. Or Bumi, either.

For the sake of keeping some semblance of propriety and serenity, Katara says that, yes, they may have a sleepover, the two of them, but with a few conditions. They may set up a tent in the Air Temple as long as they are careful not to get too close to any of the relics or wall-hangings, for those being broken or damaged would be much worse than breaking the enforced female/male segregation of the sleeping quarters. Smiling then herself, Lin goes with Katara to strip some sheets and find extra bedding. Tenzin insists on helping, so Lin piles pillows in his arms until they pass his head, and she lets him carry those.

Later when they are settled down into their white pillow-and-sheet shelter, they take turns passing around a torch, holding it under their faces, and telling spooky stories. Lin tells about the great benighted nomadic armies that used to plague the Earth Kingdom, hordes able to manifest hundreds of thousands of warriors strong at a silent command from their half-crazed leader. They had raped half of the kingdom before an ancient Avatar came forth to put them down. But they never had to answer for their crimes, not truly, after they rode into the Spirit World on the back of a great black demon.

Tenzin tells the story of Hama the Witch. And he swears it is true, on his honour as an airbender, or on his mother's honour because she is the one who told it to Kya, who told it to him.

As they go down for sleep, Lin briefly wonders if it was bloodbending that got her mother, Sokka, the acolyte, and everyone else. But she frowns into her pillow, knowing that that would mean the bad guy would've needed a full moon. The moon outside tonight is only gibbous. It is not quite full enough for bloodbending.

Eventually they fall asleep together, shoulder to shoulder, hand in hand.

**…**

Sokka did get up before Toph. He was there, waiting, as she woke up. He smiled at her and she smiled at him, but she tilted her head down and touched her cool sheets and said, "I should've seen that coming. Some esteemed chief I am."

"We all should've seen it coming, Chief."

"Sokka…" Toph's unfocussed eyes closed for a moment. When they opened again, her milky cataracts seemed faintly luminescent in the gray light of the night. "I'm a failure," she said. "I can't protect this city. I can't protect the people I _care _about. How can I expect to be able to protect my daughter? There's…"

While she paused, Sokka wanted to reach out and comfort her, somehow, knowing that a small gesture would've meant a lot for such a tactile person as Toph. But he waited, patient for her.

"You don't hear the things that they say about my little Lin—about what they will do to her. They threatenmy daughter because of me. They only talk about it, but one day one of those dirtbags is actually going to hurt my daughter to get back at me."

"But she's Aang's niece. They wouldn't want to bring his wrath down on themselves."

"If they were smart, they wouldn't. Anyway, Aang is the Avatar, but he isn't omniscient. He is only human."

"But he's strong," Sokka said, and after that neither of them said anything for a while.

But Toph did eventually lower her head again and muttered, "What am I going to do?"

"Take this," Sokka said, reaching over and pressing something smooth into the palm of Toph's left hand. There was a quiet moment as she ran her fingers over its surface. She felt a cold stone coin engraved with a Water Tribe symbol, felt a soft ribbon pinned to the stone, and felt that what she was holding was a necklace.

Toph laughed. "I'm too old for a betrothal, you dunderhead."

"Better late than never, isn't it?" Sokka asked. For once Toph didn't have a smart comeback for a rhetorical question of his. "But yesterday I was nearly so late as to completely miss my chance forever. It made me realise, I'm tired of being late."

"Then get up here and kiss me, you idiot."

While they did kiss, the throbbing in her arm almost went entirely away.

**…**

But Toph and Sokka did not announce the news. They continued to put it off, until finally the formal announcement was Sokka moving in with Toph and Lin the spring that Lin turned nine.

Lin started calling him dad, and when visiting her family she pestered Tenzin by insisting that he start calling her Cousin Lin, because they were going to have to call each other that soon, like real family. She figured they may as well start getting used to it now.

**…**

After a frantic flight through the house, chasing screams and choked sobs, Sokka finds Toph entangled around her daughter Lin.

The first time that Toph got up out of bed to wander after nightmares, she had gone to the study and fumbled around until she found a record and the gramophone Sokka had gotten from someone, somewhere, for her. She had put on the first thing she could find and listened to it over and over and over again until Sokka found her curled up in the blue, plush chair. She had drawn her feet up to her chest, effectively blinding herself for all those hours. It had taken several rational repetitions before Sokka could convince her that he wasn't a dream too.

But tonight Toph has come to Lin's room.

When Sokka turns on the light, he sees Lin's pupils retract. He sees her attempts to both cling to and comfort her mother. The girl is frantic, but she is also frightened.

"Toph," Sokka says, approaching the two of them. "She's all right. It's all right. We're all right, I promise."

But Toph says, "What if she's lifted by her blood, and he steals her voice? If he did that, I wouldn't be able to find her unless I stumbled and groped around and, Sokka—Sokka, he _took_ her from me. "

Lin wants to say, but, Mommy,_ I'm right here and no-one has taken your Lin_, but even though she grabs onto her mother's robe and forces their bodies as close as they could ever be, there is this distance between them, between mother and daughter, and she can't fathom how to cross it and it scares her young mind far too much.

.

But in the end, Toph's fears do not prove to be unfounded. Though she's right, it doesn't mean anything now.

.

The first public news story read as follows:

**TRIAD'S TERRIBLE REVENGE: DOUBLE DEATH**

_A shockingly bold move in the dead of the night has all of Republic City wondering, Is the hated Yakone truly gone? Chief Toph Beifong was found dead her in own home early this morning by a neighbour. The neighbour, identified only as an elderly female non-bender, claims to have heard Beifong's young daughter "noisily" trying to wake her mother. When the girl's attempts to rouse her mother did not stop after a quarter of an hour, the neighbour grew concerned and went over to see what was happening. Another body was found, belonging to Councilman Sokka of the Southern Water Tribe, and Chief Beifong's husband of sixteen months. Evidence gathered so far suggests that Sokka was murdered in cold blood, while Chief Beifong died of an heart attack. It is well known that Chief Beifong has been plagued by complications after having suffered some of Yakone's most malicious bloodbending several years ago; though the coroner has noted that murder cannot be completely ruled out at this point._

_An official source says that this appears to be the work of a triad still under the influence of Yakone, finishing the work that the notorious Underworld Overlord left unfinished two years after disappearing. If speculation proves correct, it is not impossible that Yakone is still..._

Lin only ever kept a copy of this report. There were several reports forthcoming, but the only new information released was the location of the funeral being held for the general public.

**…**

The one material object Lin inherited before she reached her majority was her mother's meteorite bracelet. Or, as Sokka called it, her mother's Space Bracelet. One morning after Sokka had moved in, he had happened to see the bracelet on Toph's person. He had been delighted.

Though it was cool that it was from "outer space," Lin didn't understand why a piece of jewellry could elicit such gleeful, geeky response from a fully grown man. Especially when that grown man had a beard, and _still_ he had exclaimed about a bracelet in an almost squeaky voice.

So Sokka had told her the tale of Space Sword—Spirits rest its good blade—and Space Bracelet. He also told her about how it helped her mother form her first metalbending academy, which was the same academy that Sokka had helped her save. Lin thought that was particularly interesting.

When Lin got on Toph's case for not telling her any of these stories before, Toph told her, "The bracelet resonated with you too, girlie, especially when you had a real fit! Though I didn't need it to know when you were mad. Once you got started, you'd scream for hours. But the bracelet was helpful in other ways. It's how I knew when you were wet."

Now when Lin holds the bracelet and forces it into patterns both new and remembered, it does not resonate. Often times she reduces it to a blob, making it look like any regular metal. When she does wear it she sometimes remembers her mother. But it is easier for her to remember her mother as she was when she and Sokka were younger, even though Lin never could have seen her mother at that age. This younger version of Toph had not yet come to love Republic City, but she had loved herself and her friends, and her space bracelet and her talents, and she had loved Sokka too. Somehow Lin knew this younger version of her mother better than the mother who had been the Chief of Police and died because of it.


	4. 3

Writer's Note: Okay, I promise to keep this short, but I've got two things to get out of the way. First of all, I want to give a huge-ass hug to everyone who is reading, but especially I would like to thank the reviewers. Thank you so much, dudes! ;A; (See, you made me cry, how awesome is that.) I appreciate all of the positive feedback so far! But I am not even sorry that I made you cry; in fact it makes me feel extremely happy and accomplished! As a writer, making a reader experience emotions, conflicts, and feels is my ultimate goal. So. There you go.

Secondly, I am sorry if this chapter seems strangely or awkwardly put together. I literally wrote out one half of it on the backs of 11 different sheets of paper, and the other half of it made it into my writing journal throughout the day. Hence, there are several strands that needed to be woven together. It is probably much longer than it needs to be, but there's still a lot of exposition that I need to get through. And Kya and Bumi need to be in the story, too. Though I promise - - the good stuff is coming right around the corner! There will be first kisses soon! I have this planned out to be 20 chapters plus the prologue and a really cool/fan-servicey epilogue, and in 10~11 of the chapters Lin and Tenzin are doing real relationshippy things most of the time. Like pillow talk, world travel, and being generally gross. (Also there might be some minor edits to previous chapters. I keep missing typos, and also there is some phrasing that needs to be changed. This will not actually be a big thing. I hope to get better at catching shit, too.)

* * *

When Katara would tend to the gardens kept in the greenhouse, she would round up Kya and Lin to help. Both girls were given pails and baskets for gathering fruits and vegetables, and Katara gave them each a handwritten list of what they were to pick: more or less than what was needed was never taken. Given each girl's unique capabilities, more often than not Kya helped her mother water while Lin was put in charge of planting new plants, and repotting plants that had grown.

Fortunately, Lin liked to play with dirt. Even by that time earthbending was very basic for her. Nearly an instinct. She was already working on bending amounts of metal sufficient enough to disarm five armed enemies at once.

Kya and Lin would sometimes get into fights. These were mud-slinging wars that both Katara and the defenseless flora fell into the firing range of. Either girl was as like to start a battle; like many other cycles of violence, the original instigator was unclear, thus leaving them doomed to perpetual fighting because someone always had a score she needed to settle. Katara didn't mind as long as none of the produce was damaged. Or as long as she wasn't hit in her face, on her head, on her breast. In any of those cases, they would really regret causing mischief and being such ill-behaved children. The deluge she occasionally suffered always reminded Kya that her mother really was a master waterbender, and where she had inherited her own bending prowess from.

"How does this look, Aunt Katara?" Lin asked over her shoulder. She bent the dirt off her hands, and then she wiped the damp off on her thighs.

Katara came over and inspected the row of papaya trees Lin had replanted. Bending over, she tapped on the trees' new earthen pots, checking to see how well Lin had been able to compress the soil.

"Outstanding job, Lin," Katara said. She stood back up, smiled down at Lin, touched her shoulder briefly. "You've gotten really good at crushing and controlling the earth."

Lin waved her hand at Katara, for once bating away a compliment. She had started doing that at some point in the last year, refusing to accept any praise of her bending. The better she got at bending, the less she wanted to hear about it. In fact she would almost become embarrassed, not for herself but for the person praising her, as though it was painfully obvious to her that the person was desperate to become Lin's sycophant. It wasn't exactly humbleness and it certainly wasn't timidity. Though there were exceptions whose compliments she was not above—any time Aang spoke a positive word about her progression, Lin would brighten and become as properly proud and self-assured as most eleven year olds are.

So even back then, Katara thought of that as a difference between Toph and Lin. Though the daughter and mother were so similar that sometimes Katara could swear that she herself was fourteen again and fleeing the Fire Nation, there were differences between them. That was important. Katara figured that this particular difference meant that Lin would become more mature, more early than her mother had. And there was a good reason for that.

"It's really nothing," Lin said. "But maybe if Uncle Zuko ever visits like he said he would, we could make diamonds."

Katara laughed. "Aang is a firebender too, you know. He's been a master for several decades now."

"Yeah, but Fire Lord Zuko has been a master longer! And I don't think that Uncle Aang would want to make diamonds. That's not what bending is for. Anyway, I've finished moving the trees liked you asked! I have to finish picking something…Oh, yeah, the peas." Lin made a comically horrendous face at her list. Otherwise, she picked up her basket with several vegetables in it already, and walked to the other end of the greenhouse so that she could begin her assigned harvest.

Katara joined her daughter Kya, who was watering some plants by bending the moisture that had accumulated on the glass roof and walls, bringing back to the plants the water that the thick humidity in the building had snatched from them. Kya smiled at Katara and Katara smiled at Kya. They were watering the greenhouse's one pineapple bush when a mudball blasted towards them and exploded across Kya's back, bursting loudly upon impact. Kya, losing her stance, stumbled forward and dropped a stream of water that had been suspended mid-air. The plants the water plummeted on bounced back, though they did seem to be more limp than they had been before.

Recovering, Kya spun on her heel to parry any more incoming mudballs while unleashing her own attack. Though Kya's attacks would be weaker and less forceful than Lin's—maybe not less dirty, but she was not able to form balls of mud as solidly as Lin could, creating and launching instead brown dollops that were more water than dirt, as befit her abilities.

"It's so on, Lin!" Kya cried.

"Give me your best shot, sister!"

And they were off.

Smiling wildly at the other end of the glass structure, seeming so small standing there between rows of overgrown plants, Lin looked so much like Toph that Katara suddenly had to laugh to smother a sob that stung and burnt her throat, that threatened to close it. The older woman decided simply to take cover behind a fern, though if the fighting dragged on too long, she would step in as an adult and end it.

Just then Katara had to marvel. To be sure, she wouldn't have to worry about Toph's shade coming back to haunt the island and throw-off its serenity, as she had joked about with her husband. The spirit of Toph was indeed alive, but Katara knew just then that it surely dwelt in Lin, manifesting in the girl's more open moments. All of Toph's glee and all of her humour were evident whenever Lin smiled wide and meant it.

But it was good that Lin had inherited her mother's humour. Her spark of life. If Lin were going to end up so mature at so young an age, and still deal with all that life had dealt out to her so far, she would need all the playfulness she could get. Her mother had left well-equipped in that regard.

Kya shrieked and laughed, dodged a barrage that had been aimed at her face. She quickly countered. She struck Lin in the stomach and earned a string of curses followed by a deadly laugh, threatening because of the hurt that it promised was coming.

The two girls scampered after each other down among rows of trees. Branches brushed against them along the way, whispering over Kya's bare arms and snagging on Lin's overly large robes. The robes were some of the clothing that Lin had arrived with, and which she had almost immediately grown too lean for. The robes had ended up as set of Lin's play clothes, as disregarded by their young owner as an old fad toy. Where the trees were grown more with their branches almost touching across the walkway, Lin became too entangled to move any further. Growling, frustrated at being caught, Lin wheeled around violently. She remained stuck, though her right sleeve ripped cleanly off at the seam.

And there was nothing Lin could do to stop Kya, who was now in very close range. She was leering, ready to enjoy the final strike on ensnared prey.

"Tree got your sleeve, eh?" Kya asked. She stopped an arm's length away from the younger girl.

"Hnnngghh. You got lucky," Lin said, still trying to disengage herself from the tree.

Kya smirked at Lin for a moment. She pulled her smirk in a bit, but her expression still made it obvious how smug she was, still limned her triumph irritatingly clear. She shifted her weight onto one leg and crossed her arms and asked, "Mercy, Lin? Either beg or die."

"Never," Lin said. And then _she_ smirked.

"What? That wasn't one of the opti—"

A thick cloud of mud and dirt and plant detritus fell upon them. It covered them, washed over them, clung to them, and when it was over the girls stared at each other, admiring the evidence of Lin's glorious sneak suicidal strike.

"Now we're both dead," Lin said.

After a short silence, they shrieked and laughed in delight. So loudly that Katara was drawn from her foxhole. She emerged to see the two girls laughing and bonding amidst the messy carnage of Lin's dramatic need to have the final say. Or, in this case, to have the final mudsling.

Katara cleared her throat. Her authority sounded through the greenhouse. Both girls started and froze, expectant, and even some of the more crooked trees seemed to stand a little straighter and come to attention.

"You girls," Katara said slowly, enunciating so that each syllable was burdened with her displeasure. "One day there will be a rule against _mudslides _in the greenhouse. I can't believe there isn't one already, but then I never expected that to be a problem. Now hurry up if you want dinner on time tonight. Unless you want to explain to Bumi why dinner is late. It certainly won't be my fault."

If not Katara's tone, her indirect threat was enough to straighten up both of the girls even when they were at their most rowdy. Within fifteen seconds they cleared out the mess they'd made of the walkway, gathered each their own baskets, and scattered to resume their vegetable picking.

Then, when the girls had their backs turned and their attention wholly on their work, Katara smiled weakly to herself, smiled sadly to herself, and this was the expression of her mixed up sympathy for Lin and her own raw personal grief for the untimely loss of her brother. That was a wound that she was not yet over. Probably she would never be over either. Sometimes she was exposed to a smile or action or whatever that travelled straight to her memory of Sokka and burnt that wound right open again.

For Sokka had come to love Toph so very much. Theirs had ended up being a slow-moving, slow-burning love that hadn't been much to look at at any one time, but in a lifetime it could have melted even the thickest glaciers. And in front of Katara, Lin became Toph at certain moments, and _that _wasn't easy for either of them.

It was quite stressful. And ridiculous. Katara could be overwhelmed by the way that Lin refused to be bothered learning sewing with a whalebone needle when she could just bend a metal needle and sew with that, which was more efficient anyway, thank you very much. Lin's lack of some specific manners—or even her most vaguely discourteous quirks and idiosyncrasies not uncommon to pre-teens—would set Katara off. Once they had gotten into a terrible, cosmic fight over the way that Lin never completely finished her tea, but left bits of leafs and nettles and spices and flowers floating in the bottoms of fine white bone china cups. Lin had refused to drink any tea for a month afterward, still refusing even after Katara had yelled at her again, only to return not ten minutes later to apologise and hug the girl. Then Lin had cried and for the first time choked out, "I want my mommy."

In the end Katara had to figure it all was a complicated, complex, and ugly sorrow they had to work through together as a family, taking each day as it came.

There could only be the day to day. But that didn't account for all of the other stuff that came in between. The regular daily mood changes, the thousands of daily disappointments and pleasures, or the chores that were mindless most days, but then suddenly there was one day when suddenly something would trigger an overwhelmingly, irrationally emotional response. The big sorrows always seemed more manageable somehow than a stove that refused to light or a clothes snap that would not stay closed. The small things were so intimately and personally defeating when compared to the things that were so large, so incomprehensible, so sacred, that thinking about them left Lin or Katara or whoever with a numbness that was almost like a religious experience.

Lin herself had exploded when she was turned down by Republic City's metalbending academy. She was rejected unequivocally until she came of age at sixteen. At which time she invited to apply again.

As Lin had put it, she could bend better than most of the instructors who would have—and should have—tested her the day she turned in her sincere application. But rules were rules, and those were the rules that her mother had laid down for a reason. They applied to even her. Her, whose mother had invented metalbending at age twelve.

Lin had argued that her mother would've made exceptions and taken in orphans and runaways, or just any young earthbender who was for any reason at all down her luck. And Lin was right about that. They pointed her to the Beifong's Home for Young Persons, which was the interim before _those_ children turned sixteen themselves.

But because she didn't want to stay in an orphanage, Lin had had nothing more to say to them. So her anger quelled as she accepted that her rejection was not an injustice, or even a true outrage. It was just a matter of being patient—by sixteen, she would likely be qualified to graduate two or three years early anyway.

Still, like her mother, Lin would fall into a fit and curse them. They knew that she was more than ready to take them on. "They just need to let me have a crack at them. I'd give'em a good dose of convincing then." She would bend the armour off of them, she would steal the steel spools off of them. They would pay for keeping her from realising her potential in a timely manner, in turn keeping her from following in her mother's footsteps along the road that had already been so neatly and clearly put before her. What else had her mother given her, if not this?

Even her uncle had told her, after her mother had died, that when Toph had accepted the position as Chief of Police, she had bragged that now she would become a role model for her young daughter to aim for. (It would only be many years later that Lin would correctly understand why Aang had told her this. It had been a warning of a sort, a lesson to be aware of the non-sequiturs we use to disguise difficult decisions.)

But Aang would talk with Lin, and Lin would go out to train. Tossing around a few boulders around always made her feel better. And anyway, Lin would get better about it. As she grew older, got more serious and focussed, she would internalise her temper and direct it at other things. Though she never would truly outgrow her temper, she did quickly outgrow mudslides.

**…**

In the autumn of his thirteenth year, three important events occur in Tenzin's life. Two are expected, and one comes as a surprise to all of them.

Bumi finishes basic training and is off to the south to serve in the United Forces army. Katara thinks that he may be a bit young yet for service, but then Bumi comes home for what will be his last visit in three years, and with him comes a new sense of discipline that Katara notices and admires. She changes her mind. Aang does some worrying of his own. He has faith in his son to be sure, but there's this confidence that comes with new discipline, and this confidence is a kind of light and airy cockiness that makes Aang think that Bumi might be the only one who can keep Bumi in line. That would mean that Bumi's self-control is one hundred percent a conscious choice. Most likely that means that he will either soon be up and coming, rising in the rank, or be kicked out of the army all the way home.

Who could say, with Bumi?

When Bumi leaves, Tenzin becomes the oldest child living at home. He takes it very seriously because now he is the man of the house when his father is away. And because his father cannot leave Republic City for too long, Tenzin will have to serve in this capacity full time, long term, the whole time they are in the South Pole, whenever it is that they do go.

.

Two weeks after Bumi moves out, Tenzin celebrates his thirteenth birthday. He is given his first proper razor. It is a relic, a pretty blue thing that is made up of fine, delicate, and thin lines—a coloured whalebone handle, detailed with wisps of air, hugging a razor sharpened to within an inch of splitting. But even though that is just a whimsical, fanciful image he knows is not possible, when Tenzin solemnly accepts the razor he avoids touching the blade because it is so sharp that it could shatter into two shards, not because it is so sharp that it could easily slice through several layers of skin and clothing without so much as a sting. (And how clean that cut would be, how long it would take that cut to heal without his mother's healing touch.)

He then shaves his head without help for the first time.

The party is partially serious because of its import. It is the first true thirteenth year for an airbender in what is close to 150 years now. It is an historic moment and they all appreciate that. But also it is Tenzin himself who sets the mood—he is so grave now, making himself behave as a man grown.

It is so inappropriate and stuffy, so stifling and boring, Aang feels obligated to pull Lin aside for a chat. They huddle in the kitchen. After several moments they agree on a solution. Aang asks her to "nudge" Tenzin into a more festive mood, and utilise her bending to do so. Lin is glad to help.

So as Tenzin goes to cut his birthday pie, suddenly he finds that his left foot has slid out from underneath him and he stumbles face-first into the creamy, sweet pastry.

When he stands up and straightens himself out, Lin is there to taste her work. She drags one finger down his cheek, brings it to her mouth, and licks the collected pie bits clean off.

"Hah!" Looks like you fell for it. Nice work," and she wants to call him Twinkle Toes Jr, but she realises and laughs and says instead, "Well, I'd use your nickname. But it looks like I have to make a new one up. Your feet don't seem so fancy anymore."

Tenzin reddens, and Lin says, "The tops of your ears are turning pink, T."

"It's the pie!" Tenzin croaks out. They both know that isn't true. He feels stupid and awkward after saying it, but he can't take it back now even if Lin hasn't taken it and use it against him. What she does do is smile at him, she smiles that smile that brightens her face even as it draws her eyes almost closed, and her head tilts so that part of her face is in shadow. That smile scares him. It makes him uneasy, unsure—it makes Lin seem unpredictable.

And Tenzin shuffles his weight. Lin is dressed in a clean green-and-gold robe she sewed herself special for this party. Katara helped her put her hair up. Lin wouldn't do hair loopies, not ever, but there _are_ ringlets falling on either side of her face. He is standing there dripping pie guts, and she is smiling at him.

He doesn't understand why, but the moment makes him blush so hard his entire head must be red. For the first time, he thinks of her connected to the word elegant. He has an inkling that this elegance is somehow different than the natural elegance of an airbender. It has to do with her being—being—well, her.

.

And the thing that takes them all by surprise is Tenzin inventing his own airbending technique.

The afternoon is cool wind, cool grey sky and ocean, grey broken up by patches of cool pastel colours that will become riotous once the sun sinks more. Tenzin meditates. He meditates on the concept of the illusion of the separation of things. In truth, the four elements are one. This is one lesson that his father has been wanting him to work on, a lesson he himself is a walking, talking, bending example of.

He clears his mind. He breathes, counts to seven, releases his breath.

At the moment Tenzin is in the sky. He is the air—he is the water drawn by the flame of the sun, he is a cloud floating free as he waits for more of his friends to gather.

For a time he lingers. He is waiting. In the meantime, he has the freedom to travel. Then he is a storm. Dark, fierce, and wild, he hurls himself from one cloud to the next as hyperheated plasma. He calms. He is the rain that is falling. He is the water that returns to the earth and is welcomed back with arms wide open. He is absorbed.

He is vast. He is eternal. He is substance, he is stable.

And then he _sees_.

Eyes crashing open, he inhales deeply. Stands up. On the exhale, he directs a flow of pressurised current into the eternal shape of a wheel. He mounts it, and the current is a stable vehicle that carries him all the way to the courtyard. Aang is not there; Tenzin is glad. With his head cooler now, he is able to compose himself. His initial excitement is now simmered down to a slow-burning pride. Though this pride is still troublesome and worrisome for an airbender, it is not something that Tenzin cannot control.

Breathing deeply, in and out, in and out, he sets off to find his father and ask if he might be permitted to present his progress to his master. It is important. Aang says that he may if he wishes to, but proper presentations require an audience. So Tenzin must wait until Katara and Lin have the time.

"Thank you, Sifu," Tenzin says and bows.

.

Despite her best efforts to not be a mother, Katara is so proud that she has to embrace Tenzin once his feet touch the ground and his display is over. Aang, a proud parent too, joins them and makes it a family hug.

The only one who is embarrassed by the unchecked flow of pride is Tenzin, and that makes Lin laugh.

Standing back, she laughs at him. She laughs at him a little more than she means to because it makes seeing _them_ hurt less. Seeing his dumb mortified face makes it so that she can avoid thinking, _Stupid Tenzin, at least you have someone to be proud of you_. Because even Lin knows that proud parents make things matter more, even if these things are _obviously_ stupid and pointless.

Like the scribbles that Toph praised even though she couldn't see them, as she had with Lin's laughably illegible first attempts at characters and poems. Like when Lin made her first rockangel, and that hadn't been that hard or even much of an accomplishment because the edges had been lumpy, but Toph had picked Lin up and hugged her and said, "That's my little girl."

Lin is twelve and almost thirteen, so of course she's too old for that kind of thing _now,_ but now she is no-one's little girl. She is not Katara's, nor is she Aang's daughter. Not even if he smiles at her when he praises her during training. She is no-one's daughter, so she thinks, _Tenzin, you stupidhead_, _you may as well just accomplish nothing. _Then he wouldn't have to be so put upon, wouldn't have to suffer this discomfort.

Lin scoffs, rolls her eyes, keeps back a little bit longer.

Then Tenzin explains his move to Aang. She moves closer to listen. "—And, yes, I got the idea from the earth. It's stability. I took that, and added it to help guide the movement offered by the air."

Lin's interest is piqued. She smiles, now a part of it.

"That was really cool, Tenzin," Lin says, using his name without really thinking about it, and that's something. If Aang had been letting Tenzin progress through the thirty-six levels of airbending at a pace according to his ability—if Aang hadn't been holding Tenzin back so that he could teach Tenzin each thing so thoroughly that the boy was prepared to teach it himself—Tenzin would probably have been an airbending master by now. "Your mark of mastery."

Tenzin changes profoundly. He lightens—the cast of his brow relaxes, he flushes, he opens. He smiles and asks, "Do you really mean it?" even though he knows the answer, and he should know better because he knows that Lin hates it when he asks questions he already knows the answer to. But he can't help himself.

And she rolls her eyes, and smiles. "Duh. Come on, you're practically an airbending master now."

His heart beats heavy in his chest. It drums in his ears, in his head, louder than any roar of wind. He is giddy as he was just when he first rode his airwheel. He feels just as light and released, and really the only difference between the two times is that this time he can't seem to control himself. He can't bring himself to do breathing exercises in front of her, not with his parents here, not with Lin watching him. Somehow, it matters that she is there.

He thinks, _Oh, Spirits, will I ever be able to keep calm? Please give me patience. Please give me serenity. Please give me endurance. _All things that he would need, later.

Just then, Lin hugs him because of his accomplishments and because she figures she may as well be generous with praise, because no-one will ever really properly be proud of her again. And as his heart beats faster still, there is no way for him to know that there is no turning back now.

"You've got your base down, you know. You've just got a bit further to go," Lin says.

His parents, who have fallen away, agree.


	5. 4

"Breathe, Lin." Avatar Aang said, "Concentrate. You know what you need to do."

She exhaled and imagined unwanted things being expelled from her body—out through her mouth she sent doubts, germs, ephemera, all of the soggy vegetables that she had ever been forced to eat. Smidgens of whites, oranges, greens, and magentas that had been dancing behind her eyelids dissolved like fog burnt off of Yue Bay at dawn. With the veil of meaningless optical noise lifted, Lin focussesd her mind in on a very specific image.

And waited.

Meanwhile, her feet were bare and ready to receive vibrations from the earth, waiting to shoot them up through her shins, knees, and thighs, to her hips, up along her spine and thirty-three vertebrae and through the fifth chakra in her body, up to where they would become a few small sparks among billions, and they would let her know that it was time to act.

She waited.

And then she felt footsteps.

In the course of a few seconds, Lin's left leg slid back and her weight shifted. She kept her eyes closed and aimed with her enlivened, brightened senses. She punched out, and a compact disc of earth shot out, launching a projectile with violent vicious velocity towards her victim.

Tenzin, who had been on his way to pick up his re-sized air glider, was smacked in the face by a pie. He felt someone laughing a metre away from him, but without having to hear he knew—Lin and Aang. His father. The Avatar. Tenzin wiped the pie off his face with inside of his elbow so that he could see them. Then he wiped some off with his other arm, and whatever was left he removed with a quick sharp burst of air.

"What?" he asked. He looked at two of them, indignant. The question written by the curve of his brow asked, _Really, you two?_ "I thought that pie tossing was a training exercise for airbending."

"I've adapted it to earthbending, Airhead!" Lin yelled at Tenzn. She shifted her weight, jutting one hip out toward him. "Pretty clever, don't you think? Though your father guided me through the exercise."

Tenzin gave his father a Look, and the Look expressed something between genuine betrayal and genuine reprimand.

Aang just laughed, once, twice, two bursts of mirth loud and lively as fireworks. "Breathe, Tenzin. It's also a spiritual exercise for you. For airbenders, exploring and exercising the fun-loving side of the spirit is important."

"It's not fun when you're the one getting the pie in your face."

"But you don't enjoy tossing the pies, either."

That was true, so Tenzin just shrugged.

"Do you remember what I told you about airbenders?" Aang asked.

Aang rarely chastised Tenzin, and he never treated Tenzin unfairly to humiliate him. But the question, which really wasn't a question and more of a prompting in the first place, made Tenzin grow uncomfortable. He tensed, a heat pricked at his back and crept into his belly and face. There was a pulsing at the base of his skull where his hairline used to end, where now only his collar began. He was aware of _her _green eyes on him. Several small gusts of air puffed out around him.

And Tenzin had begun to notice that he got like this whenever he had to face his father and Lin. There were a team. Together, they really stressed him out.

Lowering his hands, Tenzin said, "Airbenders must understand and embody the attributes of their element. Our element. That is why every Air Nomad was born a bender. That is the price."

"We embrace all aspects of it," Aang said. "Air _could_ be a fickle element, but it is not. Airbenders are strong in mind, light in body, and boundless in spirit. All of these aspects are important, and all require an embracing of different freedoms. You have the freedom from unnecessary want, the freedom from physical vanities, and the freedom from oppressive structures. So—laugh a little! There is a time to laugh, and that time is just as important as the time to approach life with gravity." Halfway through, Aang's straight face had broken out into an encouraging smile.

This was an important lesson, and he just didn't understand _why_—why Tenzin, who was such a fast-learner, who such a serious student, would struggle with these basic things. Perhaps it intuitively made sense, in a way. Aang couldn't shake off the feeling that it was a trade-off. But despite his patience and joy and pride in Tenzin, sometimes the boy was worrying. Which was apparent in the hopeful, sympathetic cast of Aang's brow.

Tenzin said nothing. He still felt embarrassed, and now he felt rotten too. Like a problem. As though he was a lost cause.

But then Lin stepped up, and the sun shone down on her pinned back hair and on her dirt-streaked tunic, and she said, "Up for another round, then, Fancy Feet? I'll take you on."

After a pause, Tenzin nodded. He stared at her. Then he said, "Lin," and that was all he got out before he had to move to dodge another earth disc and an incoming pie—only now the pie followed him. Because, he realised, Lin was metalbending its pan.

She had used a feint.

That was the kind of spontaneous, supple creativity that airbenders were supposed to have. Another word for this was guile.

It was also smoothness. And a chance to show off.

_And a chance to harass me,_ Tenzin thought.

Dancing away from the pie, Tenzin zigzagged around along the ground and through the air, turning and jumping and lunging and trying to get Lin to lose just a touch of her finesse, which was all it would take for her to miss a turn and smash the projectile into the ground.

But she was elegant. She was in control. Though the pie didn't _seem_ stable, she could control it, she had utter direction over it. It was so close behind him that, had he turned around to blow it back, it would have been on him before he could assume a proper position or stance.

So, without thinking, Tenzin came up with a solution. Tenzin careened, and then he hurled himself into Lin and slammed both of them down to the ground. Dust billowed around them.

Aang hollered.

Tenzin tensed and braced himself before looking down at Lin. He expected to find a very surprised, very pissed friend beneath him. Meanwhile his head and blood and body sung with adrenaline.

But just then, under his greater weight, her shoulders pinned down by his arms, with her torso straddled, his hands by her head, her chest heaving under him, and her elbows trapped beneath his knees, Lin's surprise was quickly replaced by a radiant and infectious smile. She seemed infinitely amused. If she were not that, then she was infinitely pleased.

Tenzin smiled easily, it was the only thing he could do despite himself. She had forced a smile out of him without even trying.

In a way, it scared him. And it was more elating that his father telling him, "There you go, son."

.

That night Aang broached a memory. As he and Katara settled down after a few moments of sweet intimacy, she nestled her body against his. Her hips and legs bent along the lines of his hips and legs, and her waist was lost in his warm arms. Aang rested his head on her, on the space where her shoulder met her neck.

"Hey, Sweetie, this is a bit random but—do you remember when we met? That day?"

Aang, wrapped around her, felt her chuckle throughout her body. "Mmm. How could I forget? The boy in the iceberg."

"Yeah, but not quite that. It was a little after—you asked me why I was smiling at you like I was."

"Oh," Katara said into her arm. She shifted her head slightly so that she could speak a little louder. Every movement made the sheets whisper. "Yeah. I wanted to talk to you, and there was a pause and—what was it? I wanted to ask you if you knew anything about the Avatar. And there you were, just _smiling_ at me. It was nice, but it was a little confusing then," Katara said. "Though of course I've figured it out by now."

"Oh? And why did I smile at you like that?"

"Because after meeting me, you've only ever had eyes for me, " Katara said, and she smiled so warmly Aang could feel it.

Aang kissed her bare shoulder and her neck, and the sweetly shaped shell of her ear. "You got it, forever girl."

After a moment, Katara asked, "But, why bring it up? Feeling sentimental?"

From the way that Aang shifted, Katara felt why. But before she could add a guess, Aang said into her temple, "Our son."

"Lin, then?"

"Yes."

"Well, we've all seen it coming. Tenzin only having eyes for Toph's daughter—who would've thought."

Aang said, "Yes."

…

Several days before Lin would come to live with them, Tenzin overheard his parents talking. It was a hard, quiet sort of afternoon, of the kind that happened only after it had been storming all day, and when you realised you had been tense all day through the storm, just then were you starting to relax. He sensed that he should go; his original purpose for coming had been immediately forgotten. He shouldn't have heard this conversation, but he did not go. It was a very important, very personal conversation.

"—don't think so, sweetie," Katara said. "This one's not completely white. See the sleeves here? The stitching is done in off-white."

"Huh. Well."

"I don't think I have anything to wear to the funeral," Katara said. "This stupid dress! I—"

For a moment Tenzin heard nothing. But through the paper windows of the door he could see lights and shadows. He saw opaque figures of a man and a shorter woman embrace.

.

Her husband reaches out to her. She reaches out and leans in, and Katara and Aang are encircled in each other's arms. They are still. Katara is not crying, not yet, she fought back and won against the deluge that threatened to come down when she had dropped her white-dress-with-the-off-white-brocade because it all was just _too much_.

After a while Katara says, "She is like my sister. Was. She was like my sister." Katara pauses. "Toph was here for how many years? Nearly ten. Ten years—that's almost a decade. I told Sokka to get on it and visit her, and he did. And she still liked him. We all knew that the moment that they saw each other again. That _look_. It wasn't a blush, but I'm pretty sure she outgrew that when she was fourteen or fifteen. She still _felt _for him, though I think it was different." Katara pauses. Stares at the ground, stares at the dress, she sees nothing. "I told him to hurry up, but he didn't. You know—you know, I think he came to love her so much that it hurt him."

Aang does not interrupt her, sensing she is not yet done, so he pulls her closer because he knows that this isn't going to get easier. Harder things are on their way.

"Even though I could see he loved her, I asked him one time what he was doing, how he felt, and he said. He said to me, sometimes it hurt to look at Toph—and my brother wasn't a coward. No, he admired and respected her so much, and he had always felt that way about her. He had felt that way before he had started loving her. That was why."

It is a strange place to stop, but Katara falls silent and into herself. She slumps. Aang straightens her up by pulling her flush against his chest. "Do you think it was shame?" Aang asks.

"Why?"

"I don't…really know. But Sokka, he was very internal about some things. I think every time he saw the moon, he thought of Yue. And felt responsible."

Which was ridiculous, it had been decades since then, since they had been young and up at the North Pole, and Katara had been told _no _by the man who was to become her grandfather, and it had still been winter, and Aang and Katara had only known each other for a few months. And anyway Yue had given herself over to spirits—_for_ the spirits' sake—according to her own wishes. She had willingly done her duty. And that was no fault of Sokka's.

Katara says, "Well, I don't think that he ever got over her. Suki said something about it to me the last time I saw her… And, you know, it's not something that you are ever supposed to get over."

Then Katara sobs.

She pushes against Aang, she grabs his shoulder, she pushes down on him. She grabs onto to his back, and while she hides her face in his warmth she tightens her hold. Her fists are full of his rough-spun cotton robe. She cries, her shoulders pulling in and tensing like a winch. Aang strokes a hand down along her back at a steady pace. He feels the grooves of her spine, the cool softness of her hair, he imagines each pair of ribs that his hand passes by. Eventually, he bows his head down close to hers.

"Hey," he says very softly. "Tell me."

Katara lifts her head slowly, it is like a process. She says, "I'm not ready for this. I've got three children, three older children, and I'm still not." She laughs, and then she heaves.

Katara and Aang are not young, not any longer. But neither are they old, not yet. They are not young. But they are certainly not old enough to be considered anywhere near done. Katara says, "I've not had enough time yet with my brother. All those years we don't have now—they were taken away and I want them back. But what I can do?"

"There's time to mourn them. To mourn Sokka and Toph. Then we live on. Yakone's already had his bending taken away, and now he's disappeared. Going after him is pointless."

That is it, really.

There is nothing else left to do or say, Katara _knows_, because their deaths were the final bit of the closing chapter of a story that no-one ever wants to hear again. Yakone is gone, now. He is now a shadow. And nothing can be taken or given from a shadow. Revenge cannot be had upon it.

"Yakone's money is probably feeding some families tonight," Aang says. Though he knows it is not enough when he says it. If anything, it probably will just upset her more. But it is part of what they have.

"It's hard being married to you sometimes," Katara breathes into his neck.

"I am sorry."

She draws herself up and away from him. Aang stares at her, trying to imagine what she looks like other than vaguely like a cobra. Because she isn't a cobra, and he doesn't _think _of her like that. He grows restless.

Without breaking physical contact or eye contact, she says to him, "Don't apologise, please. It is hard, but—you know, I wouldn't have it any other way. I can't think of it another way."

So Aang draws her closer, and says, "I love you." With his body he says, "Forever."

"I love you, sweetie."

They encircle one another again. A little while later Katara says, "Thank you," even though Aang has himself lost his brother-in-law and his sister-in-law, and he has lost his former eartherbending teacher with the milky cataracts and the loud proud laugh.

…

One day in the last weeks of summer, Katara asked Tenzin if he would like to accompany her to the South Pole. It would be for a few months at most. It was on short notice, yes, but she wouldn't be leaving until a few weeks into autumn. By which time it would be cold—cold because they were right out on the bay, and colder still because they were so far north and their part of the planet was now tilting away from the sun a bit more each day.

Tenzin would go. His time had come, finally. He hadn't been to the South Pole in nearly five years. He would be sixteen in a few weeks, and when the new year came, his father would be taking time off to take him to all of the old Air Temples. They would travel extensively. Soon Tenzin would be seeing the entire world as an airbender does. Just as the Air Nomads had done since the beginning.

Tenzin would probably get his tattoos on the journey too.

.

Lin had a dream the night before they departed for the South Pole.

She was blackness. She is blackness. She had always been blackness.

In the black sky a form that wasn't a form danced forever. At some point the blackness divided into sky and earth. And the form was not ready for this sudden division, and it fell to the earth. When on earth, it realised that it was blind. It had been born blind. In the darkness it hadn't needed eyes.

But it was a smart thing, and it learnt. She observes it using seismic sense.

Later on the thing became a feeling of restiveness. Lin got out of bed, and when she looked out of the window it was night and day, with the sun and moon out at the same time and both equally bright, and the pond in the courtyard was steaming. The sky was the colour of diamonds just before they are discovered.

Lin walked through the wall to get to the courtyard. As she crossed through the layers of wood and gathering sea salt and paint and insulation, she felt herself grow, and she walked into her old house in the City, where she _had _lived, once. In front of her was her mother dead on her bed. She had been crying.

Then Lin fell through the floor and fell through the cosmos and fell through her memory and fell through her life. She landed on an island in middle of a sunless sea. The moon rose, and the word _pride _echoed all around her and over the water for eternity.

.

In the morning, she awoke to find her first moon blood. It flowed between her thighs, soaked her pyjamas, stained her sheets. Lin rubbed her hand across herself, and her hand came away marked scarlet.


	6. 5

Writer's Note: Oh my god, why is this so long. I don't know. There's a lot of important stuff. There's also a lot of stuff that isn't important, it is just stuff that I want to write because after almost 25k words _hell yeah Linzin_. It is here.

Finally.

Rejoice.

Because. Yes. Fluff. Young love. And stuff. Also Lin is sexy.

* * *

The trip is five days on Oogi's back.

The trip with Appa would've been three days or perhaps four, but then Appa isn't Tenzin's bison, and anyway Aang might have need of Appa himself.

Though either way it's multiple days on a sky bison's saddle. It is long nights in the air with nothing but the dark sky that seems near because of the thick black's flatness, it is nights with the incessant wind that bites down coldly and ruthlessly, and it is nights with the occasional tuft of white bison fur that refuses to become unstuck because of some static. Sometimes when Lin looks up the stars are so close that she thinks she hears them screaming.

Or, is that just the wind?

Then Oogi is done flying for a while, and they set up camp for the night. Katara stays on the saddle buried under her coats, blankets, and her layers of old furs and skins, and Lin builds shelters on the ground for her and Tenzin. Tenzin bends the chilly air out of them before she seals them up.

The days are not much better. The wind is warmer but just as incessant, Katara sleeps during the day too, and the sky is no longer close, but it opens up and becomes vast and blue. When they're flying over the ocean—which is most of the time—there is blue above them and blue below them, and Lin thinks that they must be lost in a Water Tribesman's eye. There are other images that come to her: an impossibly big bow filled with breathable water, a tiny flying bison with tiny passengers and tiny luggage in a blue glass sphere, or a magic trick and more. But these things all make her restless. She has never really liked fantastical images. Nor has she ever had a taste for fairytales. Though Tenzin likes them, to her they are garbage and that is a difference between them. Her thoughts make her fidget and want to toss herself over the edge of the saddle and into the aerial abyss until she falls and falls back down to earth.

It all makes her feel small, unreal, and exhausted. All of this time is wasted.

By the third day, Lin has the sound of wind in her head even when Oogi lands to drink from a clear, running stream. After helping Katara back up into the saddle, Lin climbs up onto Oogi's head and settles down. On her way up she is careful not to pull too hard on his thick winter coat.

Tenzin jumps up and finds her in the rider's seat. He quirks an eyebrow at her. "Lin? I thought you didn't like it up here."

"I don't like it back there, either," Lin says, pointing back to the saddle. She has dark circles around her eyes, and even though she had spent several minutes fixing her hair by the water, something about her seems ragged and wind burnt. Her lips are cracking for they are so chapped.

"You're more than welcome up here, you know. We're happy to have you."

Oogi roars.

"Thank you, Tenzin," Lin says. "Oogi."

Lin holds her breath, though she is careful to not hold it in too deep. Tenzin takes the reigns in hand, and after a good "yip yip," they are up and off.

There are many differences when flying up here. For one, Lin can see more, she has a wider field of vision. There is no snow this far south. Below them stretches kilometers of green woods with brown patches of high-reaching cliffs. There are black patches where fires have left open wounds that only now are healing green. Then comes the forest that has been cleared for farms. The farms are patchwork and colourful and random, like poorly planned mosaics, though they're still nice because of their surprisingly complimentary and contrasting colours. Like art.

Eventually they are flying over the sea again. Lin leans back and closes her eyes. Maybe Tenzin thinks she's asleep, or maybe if she slowed her breathing he would be fooled. Could he tell the difference? She doesn't know.

She is thinking about that for a while, and then she thinks about other things, like the first time she went flying, how her armour will feel when she metalbends it around herself for the first time next year, and she wonders what sky bison dream about when sleeping.

When Lin opens her eyes again, it is nearly night. The sun, as big as her thumbnail, is millimetres from touching the horizon.

"Have a nice nap, Lin?"

"I think so. Not sure which parts I was asleep and which parts I was awake, though."

"You were asleep there for about two hours, give or take," Tenzin says.

"Oh?"

Tenzin pauses, realising too late that he has just talked himself into a corner. "You breathe a certain way when you're sleeping."

"How creepy! You know how I breathe, you stalker."

"Not on purpose," Tenzin grumbles. He looks everywhere but her. There's a lot to look at besides her.

But Lin just laughs, and as the sun's last few rays wink out, she punches his bald head before leaning up against him without so much as a word.

That night she is much warmer, and the rest of the trip flies by.

.

Lin had enjoyed the first time she went flying, in the end.

But to start with, it had been so terrifying she had started to understand why her mother would yell at her when she climbed trees, and why she was not allowed tothink about water at all, unless it was her daily shallow bath. For unless Sokka or a servant were around, or Toph had at least one hand gripping her, there was no-one to keep an eye on Lin. Toph couldn't protect her from drowning. Nothing but horrors lurked and brooded and waited, _waited_, under even the calmest of surfaces.

The first time Lin went flying, she had been scared. She hadn't liked being scared. What she would've liked less, though, was admitting that she was scared—so there's no way she would've shown it. Especially not to Tenzin, who was her friend, but who also was a boy. Her mother had told her that you never let boys think you're anything but strong. Otherwise things might end up different—different in a way that Toph hadn't explained, she had just said that once he thought you were weak, it changed everything and that wasn't something that you wanted, was it?

No, Lin had said. She didn't. She hadn't been able to imagine what it meant, but she'd known that what she'd said was true.

To keep Tenzin from knowing that she was afraid then, she had tried to keep a bored frown on her face. To seem _uninterested. _

Tenzin, who had been six, said, "Hey, Lin, would you like to go on my glider with me? My father taught me how to carry other people. Well—I've been practising with weights. But he says that I'm ready to carry a passenger now. And you're pretty small so—"

"So yes, that's fine," Lin had said and scowled at him. Tenzin had started talking too much from an early age. "Let's just go before you start trying to explain all of the things to me."

That was reasonable. Tenzin hadn't been that clear on aerodynamics himself.

The two of them had climbed to the cliffs on the west side of the island. It was a bit chillier on that side, and the sun might be in their eyes if they didn't hurry, but it had a view that would really be worth it. Tenzin carried his air glider, and Lin matched him step for step while her heart had pounded the closer they got.

Wasting no time, Tenzin fanned out his glider as soon as they'd crested the last hill. The glider made a slight swooshing as its four wings sprung out into place, and that sound had seemed louder to Lin than the sea crashing itself up against the rocks below them. It was loud even when she would remember this day years and years later.

Tenzin had brought the glider up to his back. He had bent his knees and leaned forward and had said, "Okay, Lin."

He hadn't turned around. He hadn't seen her face. But still Lin had strained to keep a straight neutral look as she approached Tenzin. She had climbed on, she had gripped the wooden centre.

Tenzin had doubled over and levelled out and started into an awkward, knock-kneed run towards the edge of the island. Lin had been so scared, so stupefied, they were airborne before she had realised that they were no longer touching the ground.

Then Tenzin had dropped them down several hundred feet and Lin's stomach dropped and her eyes widened to the sides of her head. Her heart was in her throat and it was from there that she had given a whoop.

…

The problem was finding something to do. People in the tribe were genuinely pleasant and interested in Lin. Few of them had ever seen earthbending, let alone an earthbender who could also metalbend, and technically she _was _one of them. When Sokka had married Toph he had adopted her. But though they were nice to her, there wasn't much earth around to bend and the only metal was weapons, and making weapons required a certain mindset. They taught her about her adopted heritage, but there was only so many times she could nod her head and listen to stories. Sokka had already gone through all of this to bond with her, and Lin had always had precious little patience to deal with things she had already learnt and become good at.

She could fish, she could sew. She could track animals, she could pack snow and ice to make shelters.

What she couldn't do was sail. She wanted to learn, and there was no-one to teach her in place of Sokka. She did not ask anyone to.

So she often spent hours of her day attempting to meditate, contorting and twisting Space Bracelet, hoping for this forsaken mass of ice to sink, sulking around lethargically, and generally dying out of boredom. She couldn't spar bending during the day; Tenzin was too busy, so was Katara, and there were no waterbenders despite this being the South Pole so many years after the war.

Lin was told that there _had been_ waterbenders here. She was told that they had moved north looking for opportunities that their home simply didn't offer. Lin had just listened to that.

Lin sparred with spears and swords and sometimes sticks if she were facing a younger opponent. She would sometimes construct snowmen, give them names like Bumi, Yakone, or whatever, and then she would rip their heads off with the jagged chunks of weapons she had repurposed. One time her attacks were so violent, her ammunition had kept on going and blasted clean through someone's house. Suddenly there was a hole in a wall that had just been whole, and the cold air came pouring in and the warm air leapt out, and the couple who had been inside glared at Lin. Then they had screamed like a murder of seacrows. That had been something.

The other thing that Lin does a lot is sit in the igloo for hours on end. She will not sit still, but she stays in front of an oval piece of bronze polished to shine. It is an old mirror, a valuable artefact from the Fire Nation that was lost by a merchant ship some years back. Lin will sit there and rearrange her hair in all of the styles she knows. Then she will sit there stiffly and turn her head this way and that, looking.

The style that takes her the longest is the style that Katara has always worn. Lin hates the hair loopies as soon as she makes them—in her opinion they make her look like someone else, they make her feel like someone who is not a Beifong of the Earth Kingdom. Katara was the one who taught Lin how to do her hair up, but her mother had once told her that in the Earth Kingdom, women wear their hair in many of the same ways that Katara showed her. They would bind it up, they would pin it up, they would pile it on their heads in so many pretty shapes.

Toph herself had always worn her hair in a bun. Her bangs had been overly long and had hung around her face, and they often had covered her useless eyes when she talked. It had never looked bad, though, maybe just a pit peculiar. Lin thought that the length of her mother's bangs made it obvious that she was blind, and that hadn't been bad either. Her blindness had been her mother's badge of pride. Lin was proud of her mother's blindness, too. It had made Toph seem special. It had made it so that Lin's mother was _different_ than other mothers, Toph wasn't a lily liver, and there was something about her that Lin imagined made everyone else think, _Wow,_ _I wish my mother was that cool. _

Lin hadn't minded that Toph couldn't do her hair up any other way. As with the blindness, Lin hadn't thought of it as a disability or a limitation. But Toph hadn't agreed. She would not be having it and, as in many other things, she would not have her daughter limited or restricted just because her own mother couldn't manage something. First Sokka taught Lin how to do high ponytails, low ponytails, and side ponytails, and that had been all that he could do for her.

So they had gone to Katara. Which had been sisterly bonding time for the two older women, too. After the first lesson, Lin always insisted on braiding her mother's hair before she would let Toph put her to bed.

Sitting here now, Lin stares blankly at her coloured reflection. Her reflection stares back at her. Neither of them give away anything that she is thinking. A thought that Lin has is, _I will soon be a lady. _There are places on her body that have gone soft that used to be hard. There are places where she has changed and now she cannot change them back.

She takes the whalebone pin out, her hair tumbles around her shoulders and to her waist. She returns the pin neatly back to its proper place in Katara's jewellry box.

Outside, she can hear Tenzin returning.

She thinks, _It will be his birthday soon, and I have yet to get him a present._

.

Lin knows that her mood has been bad since they've arrived. She is sour and sullen most of the time, and her laughter, already rare in milder settings, may as well be extinct now. She has been trying to be nicer, but there is too much going on inside of her head and there is too little going on outside of her head. It is astonishingly frustrating. Ennui does not mix with her personality.

Sometimes, right before they go to bed, or when Katara seems to have her attention in another conversation, or just anytime when it seems they both can handle talking and listening to one another, Tenzin turns to Lin and tells her that everything will be okay. "The weather is getting to me, too. Even though it is cold here, it's the opposite season of what it should be for us—and, you know, technically this is spring. It's your birth season."

Lin says that that is obvious. And she says that Tenzin obviously likes to say—and do—obvious things.

.

But that isn't completely true. Tenzin hasn't been_ completely_ obvious in the South Pole. Though he is still serious, solemn, and boring unless she is messing with him. She knows that he is learning about Southern Water Tribe culture from Katara even if he and she don't talk about it that much. Lin can't know for sure, but she figures that if Tenzin was keeping anything important from her, that she would be able to tell.

Still, there are some _things_ that he does that he doesn't talk about.

Particularly his solo-gliding sessions. Every day after dinner he goes out for about an hour by himself. He sets out determined. Each time he looks like he's looking for something. When he comes back, though, he is never smiling, so Lin always knows that he is looking but he isn't finding.

Once when she asks him what all of this searching is for, he asks, "H-how did you know I was looking for something?"

"Because."

Tenzin considers that. "I'm looking for a rock."

He is blushing, though Lin figures that that has to do with her confronting him—every confrontation between them that she can remember, she remembers him as being uneasy. The answer he gives is quite frankly dumb, but she knows that he isn't lying. She doesn't need her seismic sense to know that. Tenzin never lies. He just doesn't.

So she figures that he is the first one of them to be infected by Midnight Sun Madness. And here she had thought _she _was the first victim. She had spent a lot of time trying to figure out what to give Tenzin for his birthday, and still she can only come up with the same stupid thing.

.

It was once, and only once, that Lin ever wrote down something that wasn't absolutely true. As others would say, it was once, and only once, that Lin ever wrote a story.

And this was what she put in Tenzin's sleeping bag the night before his birthday. It was all that she had to give him, short of herself.

…

Toph hadn't approved of Lin only ever wearing her hair in buns. There had been days when there had almost been mother-daughter mortal combat over it. Especially when there had been social functions. Those always meant not only having to look nice, but _acting_ nice, which involved putting up with all of the stupid old adults who thought that children ought to be seen and not heard, and they would all smile down at Lin and remark about how good and how pretty she was, up until she behaved like a little girl, and then _that_ made her into something regarded less than a misbehaved pet.

She hated it.

When Lin thinks about it now she turns warm with shame. She shouldn't have fought against her mother, who had only been trying to help her. Her mother could've left her behind—in fact, there really were many times when her mother _could _have left her behind. When Lin had been a bad girl, or when she had born at a bad time and had given her mother what was called a reputation.

Lin knows that her grandparents also wanted Toph to leave her behind with them, but that a bit different. They'd wanted Toph to leave Lin behind because Lin hadn't misbehaved yet. Maybe they thought that they could save Lin from being bad, or from bad influences. But even though Lin wasn't a well-behaved child—she was a handful and has been told so many times—Toph hadn't given her up or left her behind. Toph wouldn't have let her daughter go like that.

"Not ever," Toph had said to Lin. "You're the light of my life, my little dirt queen. Hah! Even if I'm not supposed to see any light at all, I can see you shining right there before me." Toph had said it was the most beautiful thing she had seen _or _felt. Almost a thousand times more brilliant than the first time she had split metal open. That had been the same time that Toph had split open a hundred possibilities for herself, including the freedom she had for the rest of her life. It included everything from her first metalbending academy to the position she held at the very end.

And the possibilities that were her mother's are now hers, Lin thinks. Maybe not all of them, but the ones that mattered are. There's something there between them even if Toph is gone. And herein perhaps there's a design, a mission, a something with a start and a purpose and a goal, it's a thing worth something, though when Lin tries to _see _what she has in mind, and decide if it's actually real, she can't do it. A lot of thinking is involved, and it is too much, all of the important thoughts slip away from her, and they scatter. They blend into her other thoughts so that she can no longer remember what is important.

So the important things are bits of snow that fall from her hands. When they fall to the ground they are no longer important, for they have fallen and mixed with all of the snow already down there. And the snow covering the mass of ice they are all living seems to go on forever and forever even though in reality it actually does end, she knows that. But it doesn't matter, none of it does, because there's just so much of it that she simply doesn't care to think about it. _This is useless. _

What Lin is left with is that she will finally be attending the metalbending academy in a few months. She is almost sixteen. Her body is long and lean. She is tall and she is _strong. _After years of sparring it has to be true, though she can also see that it is true when she sees herself moving in surfaces that reflect her image. She has stood in front of Katara's polished bronze mirror. While standing, and not sitting, she has taken off her clothes and turned around and looked at herself. Though she now has soft spots that used to be hard, she also has hard spots that have become harder. Her shoulders slope in a way that a lady's shoulders do not slope in. She knows, she has seen pictures of what a lady is supposed to look like in the private book that Katara had given her when she found out that Lin had begun bleeding.

Lin thinks about the black armour that she will soon don. She will bend it to her will and she will bend it to every curve of her powerful body. Her fists clench, and she imagines that this will make her stronger than she already is.

Maybe even render her invincible. If her mother hadn't taken off her armour when she was at home with her family, perhaps Toph Beifong would still be alive today. Then Lin wouldn't be the only Beifong with black hair either, for she imagines that her grandparents must have grey hair by now.

She will be so strong, she thinks.

She doesn't notice the spot that is growing larger and larger in the sky. Nor does she hear the footsteps, but then that really doesn't mean much. She can't feel anything through the snow and ice. To her it is silence and blindness and nothing. It is like having no purpose.

.

There were two chores that Tenzin had insisted on performing that day. Despite the fact that, as Lin had put it, "It's your birthday, _Airhead_."

One was spreading gravel around the campsite. The sun was up more and more these days; there was more and more warmth in a day. This extra sunlight was nice on the skin, but it was melting the snow. The melting snow was a mixed blessing. It meant that now there was less snow, and it meant that now there was more ice, because what else does water do when the sun goes down and things suddenly grow colder? The gravel that Tenzin had spread would give them all extra purchase around camp. Fewer people would suffer fewer slips and black and brown bruises.

The second chore that Tenzin insisted on performing that day really wasn't a chore so much as a basic courtesy to the two women he was living with. And yet Lin had still relentlessly harassed him about it: making his bed.

Though her teasing had annoyed him, making him fume and fumble and blush as usual, he'd persisted dutifully in straightening it up. Inexplicably, Lin had suddenly grown red and spat at him, "You're impossible!" before stomping out in too few layers.

And then he had found a bundle of papers he certainly hadn't gone to bed with. On one of the papers was written neatly in a steady hand—For a bald boy's birthday.

Tenzin had put the papers aside to read later. He assumed that it would be something rather amusing. His mother had called him soon after, and he had forgotten about the papers up until he realised that he hadn't seen Lin all day. Not since she'd gone back into the igloo after he'd left it.

So Tenzin had gone and sat down with the papers. He had read them. He had read them again. He had then picked up his air glider, mounted it, taken off. Just now he was approaching Lin, whom he has finally found.

…

The first page reads:

_I am not a storyteller. _

_Now I have told you this, Airhead, and you and I both know that is true. If anything, you are more of a storyteller than me. The only things in that head of yours are air, space, stories, and seriousness. But, hah! You're not creative enough to come up with anything of your own. _

_Neither am I, but then I'm not an airbender, you blockhead._

_Still, I have to give you something for your birthday. So here is a story that was given to me. It is not my story. But the people whose story it is are gone now; so maybe it is a story I should give away._

_Don't bother sharing it with your mother, though. She already knows it. But I don't think she'll know what to use it for. _

_Anyway, the story—this is the story of a girl and a boy who loved each other and kept at it, even after the girl became the moon. _

And the last lines read:

_They kissed. He held her as she disappeared. After that, he was never alone. He need only look to the sky at night and there she would be, looking down at him no matter where he was in the world._

_And there is more to the story, but that part is not for you. Not yet. You're too young to appreciate longing. I think this ending is better suited to your whimsical fancy!_

_Happy 16__th__, Airhead._

_Your best friend,_

_Lin Beifong_

There was more to the story, but that would come later.

…

The last thing that Lin expects to see in Tenzin. As she turns, she is so sure that she is going to be fighting a sealbear in the next few seconds that she puts on her best snarl, puffs out her chest, makes herself as horrible as she can.

But there he is. And he keeps approaching. He is closing in. He seems determined, she thinks, but it's hard to tell. He has always been so focussed even when there's nothing worth focussing on.

Lin smirks to recover, and she is going to take a stab at him before wishing him a happy birthday, but then she doesn't get as far as her first word, she only makes it to parting her lips before Tenzin grabs her shoulder with one hand. With the other, he brings her face up to his.

They are kissing.

Over his shoulder she can see what passes for the sunset in a Southern summer. The sun _hovers _above the horizon, obstinate and prickly, and it will not be going down any more than this, it says. But the sun is small and it seems distant. It is inconsequential and removed. No-one cares about its little fit.

Lin then tries to look at Tenzin, but her eyes grow heavy and everything turns hazy. Everything has turned warm, even the ice beneath them, and that has constantly been biting her feet no matter how thick her boots have been.

Lin kisses Tenzin, and then she pulls back. Catching her breath, she wants to search him.

But he says, "Not yet," and he kisses her again. Which is simply not enough for either of them this time around—Lin seizes onto his robe and pulls herself up, she closes the gap that has grown between their heights over the years, and he says her name into her lips. Without airbending a cushion of air he pulls her back and together they fall to the ground with her on top.

That gets her going, and she won't pull back now until he's sure that his lips are as raw as hers had been on Oogi's back.

When she _does_ pull back, she's still close but far enough to allow some air between them. It's faintly alarming and very intimate, Tenzin realises, for it's like they are breathing the same breath. Though really they're panting like teenagers. Or like athletes who have just finished sparring very, very hard.

She straddles his hips. He sits up to hold her.

Finally he says, "That—that felt amazing." A beat. "I'm sorry."

Lin laughs. "Some priorities you've got! Such a charmer you are."

"I've wanted to do that for a really long time."

"It's about time. I was worried that you'd leave on your grand trip with Aang and—well. You wouldn't have done anything. This." _And things would have been different_, she says to herself as she holds him close. Things would have gone differently.

"Please don't tell my mother."

Lin smiles at him. Her lips are no longer blue. In the powdery polar summernight, her eyes are an opalescent grey, they are where the celestial lights are hiding until spring.

"Are you kidding?" she says. And he's worried because she's laughing at him, but then she says, "She'd kill me. You're going to have to tell her that _you_ kissed _me. _Happy birthday, you lucky man."

Tenzin frowns, but he knows that it's true, Lin does too. They both know it, and they laugh and laugh until she kisses his forehead where his arrow will soon one day be, and he decides that, his life be damned, kissing her one more time _is_ worth it. With a quick bend of warm air he pushes them both up without letting go. He kisses her along the bridge of her nose until she moves her head and finds his lips again with hers.

And, hell, he is lucky, because for now Lin is soft and bright as the moon. Compared to her, this night's sun really is just a star.

…

By the time that they've departed the South Pole, Lin's right. Tenzin _hadn't_ in fact told her everything he'd been up to. He had learnt about all Water Tribe traditions, including marriage rites. To be sure, he'd had a hard time looking at his mother's necklace that was now a betrothal necklace. For a few hours after that particular lesson he couldn't face her. He couldn't help being embarrassed for suddenly his parents' intimate lives were suddenly in his face and—

After he had managed to get that bit under control, it hadn't taken long for thoughts of _her_ to come trickling in. They came second by second, minute by minute, until by the end of the day he was thinking the inevitable:

Would Lin laugh in the face of a betrothal necklace?

Probably. Maybe. But he didn't know. He wouldn'tknow until he tried.

So every day he had gone out for an hour to look for a proper stone according to tradition. He had even told Lin when she asked. In a way he was trying to gauge her reaction…but it had seemed as if she hadn't caught on.

Which had probably been a good thing.

Maybe it had let his hopes live long enough to, very gradually and very steadily, grow into determination. But it had only been on the day before they were to leave that he finally found a stone that would suit. The thing needed to be carved too, and that would take days to make it look nice—nothing less would do for her.

He didn't have days. He needed to fly Oogi to take them back to Republic City.

And after that, he would be off to see the world with his father.

So maybe he would have time then, he had hoped. He would just figure out how to do it without his father catching on.

Somehow.


	7. 6

Writer's Note: Holy hell, dude, with this chapter here I am more than 1/4th of the way through the main body of this story. I don't know if I can take that.

Where is my life going.

Besides down the drain.

Ahhhhh.

Anyway, thank you _so much _for the reviews. They honestly make my day-it is like freaking Christmas, New Year's, _and_ getting an A+ on an essay whenever I receive a new one. Even though I would write this story without them, they help me power through; especially since I get so sick of reading my own writing. I seriously don't understand why anyone thinks it is great, but it seriously makes me happy that you do. Style is such a personal taste, haha. I also wonder where the hell I am getting 99.9% of my characterisation. I do think about it, but I am also making it up as I go. Just-whatever feels right, I use. Okay. I should probably stop talking about this now.

As for this chapter: it's a little dry, but there's a lot of interesting stuff in it, I think. For example the soundbending junk-that's all the result of research. Perfect silence _will_ drive you mad. There is a lot of implied Linzin below, but more no action for them as a couple just now. That'll be in the next chapter, when Tenzin and Lin meet again after two years. Plenty of time for a lot of sexual tension to boil over, no?

* * *

The first lesson Tenzin learns is about silence. No matter how they endeavour, or how clever they may be, airbenders are not able to create absolute silence. They've never been able to.

"You can create complete silence inside of yourself, but you cannot create complete silence outside of yourself. It's about controlling yourself, not the world. It's not up to us to control the world, but rather it is up to us to control ourselves so that we are able adapt. Then we can tackle whatever the world has in store for us," Aang says.

The trainee Tenzin does not open his eyes. He nods.

"Listen—these are the sounds of the world."

For a while, Tenzin does listen. They're at the Western Air Temple first. And it is quiet, but it is not _silent_. The world is alive and the temple is alive with sounds. Tenzin can hear the wind and the echoes that it makes through the buildings hanging over them. He can hear the wind roaring in the gorge gaping besides them. He can hear the faint rumble of the earth beneath them.

Tenzin exhales.

"Though," Aang continues, "complete silence _can _be created. But, as with anything else made by human hands, created silence is artificial. It's unnatural. And it was not possible until recently—as with many other things, much has been changed in recent history. There was a "Silent Room" created by an Earth Kingdom scientist at Ba Sing Se University. In this room the scientist placed a man to be his test subject. The test subject didn't last more than an hour—at first the silence hadn't been so bad, but absence of external sounds amplified his own internal sounds. His heartbeat started as a murmur, then it grew to a whisper, then it grew to a loud conversation, then it grew to a drum, and then it grew to a marching legion in his head. But he couldn't escape his body. And, on top of the cacophony of the legion, he started to hallucinate. The blood flowing in his veins became a rushing, swollen river ready to burst through his skin.

"He went mad."

Tenzin's utterly still. Then he pushes his knuckles together a little closer in his meditative stance, finding his centre over his sternum. He imagines his chi flowing, otherwise in this moment he feels that it will not move of its own accord. It would refuse to move down his arms and legs and up to his bare forehead. As Tenzin exhales, his breath blows down between his hands and chest.

"The report the scientist published with his findings hasn't been circulated." Aang pauses. On the surface his son remains as unmoved as bedrock, he has so nearly mastered his physical body. But Aang perceives that Tenzin's mind has been moved by a piquant detail of his father's story. "This artificial silence is one technology that I didn't want to see widely known and disseminated. The Earth King agreed with me." And now Aang can only hope that one day it doesn't end up as one of the many methods of persuasion in the Dai Li's arsenal.

Aang then says, "And keeping it veiled is for the greater good. There're already far too many ways for someone to steal another's life—ways that this room makes look almost compassionate. But, you must be wondering why I am teaching you this. To come back to airbenders, I have already told you that we can't create pure silence."

The sun is setting. Light has begun to hit the opposite wall of the gorge, giving it colour and making it bleed in tones of bright reds, oranges, and yellows. The light creeps down, and the colour seeps down.

"What airbenders can do is create sound. This is our ultimate technique, if you would prefer to think of it that way. It corresponds to the lightning of firebenders, the bloodbending of waterbenders, and the metalbending of earthbenders. Unlike all of the other higher bending arts, though, soundbending is achievable by any airbender—but no airbender is permitted to use it."

There have been exceptions who've gone against this prohibition of course, Aang may as well say, but instead he says, "For it's lethal to its victims when it's used to attack. Used in such a capacity, it's also always lethal to the bender who utilises it. This is the karmic price."

Tenzin, who has stayed silent until now, says, "All life is sacred." His sixteen year old head's spinning despite his efforts to clear it. He had been meditating and mostly peaceful, doing such a good job listening and absorbing as his father taught him. But he had not been expecting this.

_Soundbending. _

Just the sound of it is fantastical.

"All life is sacred," Aang says. Aang stands up slowly and, with his hands held behind his back, he circles around his son once, twice. "But every airbender must learn about this technique. It is a part of airbending. To him who will become an airbending master, nothing is hidden. Do you understand this?"

"Yes," Tenzin says. The word echoes around them.

"Then we shall begin the second of your final lessons."

Aang then explains soundbending to his pupil. They go through the stances, the forms, what is the proper mindset, the history of the technique, times when it has been used, and what the technique does in disturbingly precise detail.

"And it's not theoretical," Aang says. "We know for sure this is what happens when soundbending's used." The monks and nuns who had been the first performers had all been dissected, studied, and studied again and again to try and understand the nature of the technique. For years it had been a repulsive, engrossing mystery. The victims had never shown a single external symptom, not a bump or bruise or scrap or any other bodily evidence of distress. There had only been their faces locked in a single expression of sudden, ineffable pain.

Internally, however, their bodies had always turned out to be absolutely savaged. Hearts were torn, arteries were truncated, brains were asphyxiated. So something horrifying definitely had happened.

"What was finally figured out was that force from the bent sound is so great, it shreds through the lung tissue, forcing air bubbles into the arteries," Aang says, tracing a finger along from the centre of his chest, to the side to his heart, up to the crown of his head. "And then it is a matter of seconds before death, you see, for the blood flow is simply cut off. It is a fast death, and one of the only two ways in which airbending can kill."

Before the sun completely sets, the technique has been passed on.

.

The Eastern Air Temple doesn't have as many rooms or amenities as the Western Air Temple, and its statues and views aren't as enchanting in such a breathtaking way, but as soon as Tenzin slides down on Oogi's tail, he feels lighter than he ever has before. He feels that this ground is _sacred_. This temple doesn't have the mystical allure of all-day echo chambers, pagodas hanging down from the roof of a cliff, or wind singing mournfully through a gulf at any hours of the day. But still—Tenzin is compelled to be here.

It's pleasing, and it tickles his fancy, and it makes his spirit buoyant.

As Aang leaves him to meditate for twenty-four hours, Tenzin becomes weightless easily and leaves his body. He passes right up through his seventh chakra to dwell in celestial places.

When a day has passed and the sun has returned back to its zenith, Aang sits down near his son and waits. Aang had gone walking through the temple's deserted stone hallways looking any signs of the wise man who'd aided him so long ago. Back then the man with the spirit of a free happy child had helped the young scared Avatar unclog his chakras, and also ascend through his seventh chakra for the first and final time. It was a long shot, Aang admits, but it could've been that Guru Pathik was still alive. Could a human live over 200 years, if she or he wasn't the Avatar? Aang doesn't know. Avatar Kyoshi, who'd achieved 230 years herself, wasn't sharing her beauty secrets with Aang, and apparently she hadn't shared with Roku either.

Aang has looked, but there was no sign that he could find. In fact, every time Aang has visited this temple since the war, he has never found anything more helpful than a cup of onion and banana juice. Perhaps_ that_ is karma.

Tenzin's still meditating six hours later. Aang can sense that his son's soul and spirit are currently not present, so he himself goes off to walk around again, and find something to eat. After one circuit Aang heads to the sky bison stables. He smiles at their two sky bison, Oogi and Appa. He then talks to them for a while, telling them about how he remembers how well Sister Iio had played airball, about how excited he had been the night before he picked out Appa, about his son who might just be able to meditate for forty-eight hours straight. The time that he tried to give up his love in this temple.

Appa yawns.

Laughing to himself, Aang jumps up onto Oogi's saddle to grab some food and rummages through one of several identical rucksacks. While Aang's thinking that his son has his spirituality down pat, but he's a mama's boy who apparently can't be bothered to pack his dirty robes into the _laundry bag, _Aang realises that he's looking in the wrong place for what he wants. Rather this is Tenzin's personal bag in his hands.

And it is too late—as Aang re-packs the clothing that he has pulled out, something slips out of its bundle and lands partially on his knee. Aang looks down at the betrothal necklace his son has nearly finished carving. He stares at it for a few moments, appreciating the smooth, well-cut intricate lines in the stone. Lines that are so finally wrought, they look like swirling threads of precious metal caught frozen in mid-flow. The design is definitely not Water Tribe, and it is only a little bit Air Nation.

Nonetheless, it is a pretty necklace.

Aang picks it up. Sighs, before placing it back in Tenzin's personal pack. Not for the first time since the beginning of this trip, Aang thinks to himself, _And here is a change for us._ Things cannot be the same for airbenders, Aang knows. The Air Nomads are gone. In a way, too, this trip has made Aang realise how true that is.

Not only are they all dead and gone save for him, but, when he himself passes away, Air Nomad culture will pass away too. For Tenzin is not a true Air Nomad. He has been raised by two exclusive parents, he has grown up with his siblings. These are not the beginnings that shaped proper Air Nomads. Not to mention that while Aang teaches his son to the best of his ability, there are just some things that refuse to filter down. So there must be adjustments and changes, even in the most pure transfusions of his culture. Air Nomad culture is Aang's culture, but it is not Tenzin's culture. With him, it has become Airbender culture.

Though there is this change and many more, Aang doesn't think they are either good or bad. They're just differences.

Aang goes back to Tenzin and waits. Then at seventy-two hours he draws the line. Standing behind his son, Aang dumps a bowl of cool clear spring water onto Tenzin's head, and then he dances back to avoid Tenzin's flailing arms.

"W-what?" Tenzin asks, alarmed. He looks around him as he breathes heavily.

"It's been three days," Aang says. "Look, you've got stubble! Besides, it's time for your next lesson. You've got your spirituality down. I am very proud of you for that, but we need to use this time for other things. There're cultural lessons for you to learn yet, and this is the only place to teach you." One day, Tenzin will have to teach an Avatar to airbend. Before that, he will have repopulate and revive a race.

After Tenzin dries off with a blast of air, they go for a walk through all of the corridors of the temple, and Aang shares his heritage with his son and pupil. For Tenzin, time becomes a prayer wheel. The days repeating ever the same. His father's words are constantly collected, and each lesson is collected, and the power in Tenzin's head grows.

.

They are somewhere over the Earth Kingdom when he remembers her.

Tenzin is dreaming. He is on Oogi and Oogi is flying beneath him, but something about this is not like the normal arrangement. It is because Tenzin is not taking Oogi somewhere but Oogi is taking _him _somewhere.

He tries to say something, but there's a twister in his throat. He can't quell it no matter how hard he tries to bend it away.

When he thinks to look down, an army stretches out for kilometers in all directions. What Tenzin sees his dream names as _The Night Army_. This here is the fabled military which rode out of the world, which was conjured by an unspoken word, which had fled from the Avatar's justice.

And now it is back.

"Isn't that something?" Lin asks him. She's suddenly there. She's attired in the robe she had worn at his father's last banquet, a fine thing that belongs more on a gourmet pastry than a sky bison's head—he himself thinks so. And there is something so puzzling about the way that the intricately stitched sleeves are forced up by the wind so as to leave her forearms bare. As if she is more naked this way than if she had worn no robe at all.

She's leaning on all fours to get a good look over Oogi's head. She's practically hanging off of the sky bison and Tenzin wants to say something, _to save her_, but it won't happen. Why will she not come back? Why will she not grab onto his arm and sit at his side where it is safe? And it would be safe by him, despite the hundreds of thousands of immaterial nomadic warriors charging below.

Of course, Tenzin could reach out this whole time. And then he does, and when he touches her, she says, "Do you remember me yet, Airhead? That's a start! Now what about those secret plans of yours?"

Then Lin laughs at him and Oogi dips and begins to fall, and Tenzin knows that they are going to fall through the air into a sea of horses and warriors and into earth, but he and Lin are shoulder to shoulder, hand in hand, they might make it, except that they don't. Tenzin wakes up because he has rolled off of Oogi in his sleep.

Groaning, Tenzin stands up. He's not able see what has become of the Night Army or Lin Beifong. He is warm. So—a dream.

_Of course it was, Airhead._

Sighing, Tenzin climbs back up onto Oogi. Normally he would meditate on a dream so stark, but he's pretty sure he understands the meaning already. Though his secret plans aren't really secret at all. Nor are they even proper plans.

He has never thought the betrothal necklace would actually be a _Betrothal__ Necklace_. He realises this now even without thinking about it. The necklace was a present. Because it would be something nice to give to Lin; she herself has very personal ties to Water Tribe culture, and why not give her something?

He hadn't really meant to_ propose_ marriage. The necklace had been meant as a gift—a sentimental bauble, to call it by a name more suited to its original intention behind it.

But then Tenzin had been forced to dwell on it by his father, who had found the necklace and decided it was time for a special lesson that was more father-son than master-pupil—The Ladies Talk, if Tenzin would. So Tenzin had realised that he hadn't meant to_ not_ propose to Lin, and _that_ was something. As it were, he had never thought about his future without Lin somewhere in it. They had been in each other's lives as they'd grown older, and so Tenzin'd just assumed it would continue. What else there was—Tenzin couldn't imagine, and hasn't bothered to.

Which meant, in more ways than one, Tenzin had never thought to let Lin go.

It also meant that he loved her.

…

Every time that Lin had tried to meditate, it hadn't gone as she'd expected. Or as she would've liked it to, really. No matter if she were alone, with Aang, with Tenzin, with Tenzin _and _Aang, a group of Air Acolytes, or if she were with any other combination of surrounding presences, Lin simply couldn't figure it out.

She had of course been able to manage the doing nothing part of meditation well, and staying relaxed in the beginning. Waiting was what the earth did. That was the way to survive and exist over such vast epochs. Lin could imagine herself as a spread of land, waiting and waiting, existing through an entire cycle that took several centuries to change her from a lush forest to a desolate desert. The concept of waiting was negative jing, and her mother had drilled that into her head since she could stand up and sense with her own two feet.

But what came after, that was what had been impossible for her. While anyone else's spirit would soar off within moments of sitting down, Lin's would remain behind. Steady and stable and admirable, but not free. Which was the goal of meditation.

Once Bumi had found her struggling earnestly to free her spirit. He had come up to her, put his hand on her shoulder, and he had dragged her away so that he could talk to her without interrupting his father or his brother.

"Come play with Kya and me!" he'd said once they were away into the bushes. "We need someone to build a cave for the platypus bears we're gonna capture."

"That's stupid," Lin'd said with a scowl. "There're no platypus bears on this island, and anyway I don't have time to earthbend right now. I'm trying to meditate, stupidhead."

"Blah." Bumi'd shaken his head. "Why bother? You're always trying to meditate!"

"It's important. Your father said so."

"Then why don't you actually meditate?"

Lin'd paused, and then she had had to say to him, "Because I haven't gotten a hang on it yet."

"Then stop trying for a while, Lin." Bumi'd said. He had paused for a moment as someone walked by, but he had stared at her the entire time. "If you try too hard, how're you gonna let go? When you try, your eyes close so hard it looks like you have to shit. How's your spirit supposed to escape then? Through your bum?"

Of course Lin had hit him with several rocks then, but he'd had a point, no matter how juvenile he had made it sound. Rather than give up though, Lin had tried harder the harder she failed. She would remain peaceful during sessions as if she actually had been meditating, but afterwards she would always have to go out and break the swell of her temper against some rocks, lest it grow too much and lead to something she'd regret. Aang had always encouraged her when she came back bleeding and becalmed, her dirty face tear-streaked—it would come in time, surely. Lin just had to find what was the right base for her. After all, the earth chakra was the lowest of the chakras, and therefore the easiest to have blocked. Fear was what blocked it, and fear was something that everyone had to face everywhere, every day.

Then one day, Lin had simply _understood_ why meditation wasn't working for her. She'd been sitting among a group of non-bender Air Acolytes, each robed in saffron and red and yellow and matching the colours of the sun over the bay, and Lin'd open her eyes and she'd seen for the first time that all of these people were not of her element.

Her element was earth—she was earth, through and through, and this was her mother's legacy. She could never have had too much earth in her for she was her mother's daughter.

She was Lin Beifong. They were all airheads.

And that was the biggest reason why she is here today, graduating from Republic City's Metalbending Academy a full two years early.

She will officially join the police force tomorrow.

She spends the night writing and reciting the speech she has agreed to give.

.

"—And part of our city's problem is balance. We have a rule of law that equalises us all—people from all nations, benders and non-benders alike. But the arm of the law is no longer strong enough to allow the rule of law to extend to its fullest potential. We know what our best practices are, and yet we are not implementing them to the true extent of our abilities. We are not reaching our capacity. We are not doing our best.

"I will not stand for this."

Lin pauses just briefly, and it is easy to assume that she does it for dramatic effect, but that assumption does not take into account Lin's mood, and nor does it account for her attitude in this moment. She stands tall, her shoulders are straight, her legs are a distance apart. She must of course stand straight because of the armour that is now her skin, but she stands straighter than _that_. She is proud and strong, and that is shown by the deliberate curve of her spine. Though her hands are behind her back, she will not allow herself to clench them, for she knows that that would give her just a bit of comfort. She will not allow herself to prove that she could possibly falter even just a little bit in this important moment.

She must speak of her mother, for this is part of her speech.

"I will not stand for this, and neither would our previous esteemed Chief of Police, Toph Beifong."

And now Lin pauses. This time it _is _on purpose.

"I have sworn an oath of service to Republic City. Protecting it is now my duty—and I shall do my duty to the last."

The ground rumbles from the applause and stomping and general hullabaloo that Lin has engendered. She is adored. And for a second her mind lights up with vibrations in spite of the heavy boots encasing her feet—it is nothing but a frisson, it is nothing but a spark, but for the tiniest of moments Lin can hear her mother talking to her.

She thinks her mother would've said, "Now_ that's_ my girl."

.

Many of Lin's fellow graduates take Lin's theme to heart. And they go to town with it, getting smashed to _their_ fullest extent—a good deal of them will wake up hangovers more debilitating than migraines.

Lin attends the party too, but she does not touch more than the same single cup of rice wine the entire night. All of other graduates are older than her; Lin is not quite eighteen, and already tonight she is sizing up and categorising her fellow law enforcement agents.

She knows that they will not be her peers for long. Taking a sip of her wine, she thinks of how much work she will have to do once she makes Chief of Police. Though what did she expect of her fellows, really—they simply aren't cut from the same cloth as her. They are twenty or twenty-one and young and talented and inexperienced and callow.

She is Toph Beifong's daughter.

.

But still, there had always been times when it hurt. When Tenzin, Aang, and she would sit meditating, she had never thought of them three as being together. It had been Tenzin and Aang meditating together as father and son, as master and pupil. It had been Aang and Tenzin, and her—she would open her eyes sometimes and simply watch them and wonder where they had gone off to. And were they then together there too, wherever there was?

She had been wearing Air Acolyte robes for a while, which had let in breezes between her thighs and over her belly that her own robes had never allowed. She hadn't been allowed to don the get-up of an airbending pupil, but then she'd never been interested in trying that. By that time she'd already tired of making fun of Tenzin for his parachute pants. As if he needed when he fell from the sky.

Aang had always told her, _Next time_, _maybe_. And, spirits help her, each time there always had been hope for a next time, maybe, until Lin had one day finally left a session early on her own. When her back had been turned, she'd said, "I am earth, and I move metal."

She knew she wouldn't need meditation in the metalbending academy, at least not truly. Metal was too strong for the fickle—no lily liver would ever be manipulating _it_. Metalbenders are strong, not spiritual.

.

The graduates are not the only ones who attend the party. Several young officers are there, mingling. They are senior officers now that this new batch of juniors has come in. After tonight, though, they will be working side by side down at the station, on the streets, or up in the airships.

One of the oldest males at the party approaches Lin. He is considered good-looking, with his tanned skin, brown hair, grey eyes, white straight teeth. He is not the tallest there, but he is taller than Lin and she's not exactly short. She has grown to become as willowy as her aunt had predicted.

Lin sits with her upper body supported by the bar and her drink balanced in her hands. She could be drunk, or she could be sober. He is not sure. She is red in the face, though that probably has to do with the rising ambient heat in the room, the pollution of so many moving bodies in too little space.

"That was a great speech," he says to her. He is twenty-six, and he sits down next to her.

She does not look at him. "Thanks," she says.

He says, "You're beautiful."

"I'm not interested." She takes a sip of her saki, puts her cup down with one hand, and then she scowls at him.

But he laughs and points to her cup. "How many of those have you had? One? Two? That's not enough to celebrate making it to the force—the metalbending force. We're elite now, baby! Come on, loosen up. You'll have the rest of your career to keep a stiff upper lip in front of the garbage we are in charge of cleaning up in this city."

Lin has never heard her Uncle's city described in such a way before.

_Shut the fuck up_ she could scream at his odious head, but instead she slams her foot into the bar. A section of the bar dislodges and shoves the older officer from his chair. "This seat is taken," Lin snarls, "until my boyfriend gets back."

"What a shame," the man says to her. He rolls up, spits at her, and smirks. "I doubt he realises how much of a bitch he's stuck with."

He walks away in disgust, and Lin adds another tally to her list. The list of officers who will need to be bent back into shape grows longer and longer.


	8. 7

Writer's note: I like reading fluff. Reading fluff makes me happy. Fluff makes me a happy person.

However, I do not like _writing it. _So, fair warning, the end of this chapter may crash and burn, it may be thunderingly medicore, or it may make you smile.

Idk what even. I consider this chapter to be the final chapter of part I of this story.

Anyway, here's a theme song-thing for this chapter: Tunglið by Ólafur Arnalds. The best place to find it would be youtube.

* * *

Sometimes, two years is a short time. Sometimes, it's a long time. Sometimes, it's an entire lifetime.

For them, these two years have been many things, and they have experienced many things and more.

For one thing, they both are no longer children—legally, they're both adults. Tenzin's nearly 19, and Lin has come into her inheritance. Of course it's not the Beifong fortune, but her mother had been saving and setting aside a sum each year. Katara's the one who insures that Lin receives what Toph intended for her daughter. And Sokka had done his best to make sure that Lin would have something to start with. Katara makes certain that Lin sees this money, too.

A good part of her inheritance is put down on a decent flat in a part of the city that has become nicer since her mother's passing. It's a part that's safely middle class and not stuffy, for that is what Toph always had said that they were—she worked and they had money, but they had never been _rich_.

Her mother had had an entire history with that short word.

Lin furnishes the flat nicely if sparingly. Though not as sparsely as to have it confused with an airbender's residence—she's careful to make sure of that. Her furniture is white and wood, and Katara helps her pick out what's known as _drapery, _which Lin can only assume is not the same as simple lowly curtains. Everything ends up matching and harmonious and overall grey.

As Lin puts it, her flat has a synergy. Just like her life. In the morning she can see the sun colour the city as a great majority of the city wakes up for the day. Save on days with copious amounts of fog, mist, or clouds, Lin also can see Air Temple Island from one of her windows in the mornings. Through the glass and across the bay, and with a part of the city in between, there is _distance_ between her and that place. When she looks out at it, her body tingles.

After she is settled, Katara no longer comes out to visit. Lin puts the rest of the money away. She begins to live on the paychecks she's pulling in, and she lives neither worse off nor better off than her peers. Her life is not peaceful, but it is contained. And, for the most part, controlled.

She begins every day with a cup of tea and the paper as the sun chases the night's shadows up her grey and lacquered wood walls. Then it's off to the station, where she always does her best to further the justice that the Avatar her uncle has envisioned for every citizen.

Lin busts triads, tracks down robbers, sometimes even directs seas of Satomobiles when traffic becomes inexplicably and hopeless tangled. A few times she breaks up domestics. She works until everything she has been assigned to do is finished, and even when she does more than that she always feels as though she has more to give. But her shift is over. Or her double-shift is over.

Then she goes home. On the way back she grabs a takeaway of wanton soup, or noodles, or whatever else she can get at a reasonable price for one person. She goes by the same park. Often there're couples both young and old regardless of what time of day she comes passing by, but mostly they're young. It's seeing these plentiful younger couples that's strangest for her—they're one of the few things in her life that make her stop and think, _I am eighteen years old_.

There're also handfuls of grass that're emerging from the snow in the park—and they _do _emerge a little more each day, as the days finally begin to grow warmer. It is well past the eve of spring, but still the trees all remain bare and the ponds turn the colour of steel once the ice has melted. It is well past the eve of spring, and Lin's days are grey. She rises to grey mist mornings, her flat's walls are grey, and it is grey at the station even in places where stately lights illuminate rich wood.

And these grey days haven't required thought to navigate. So Lin rarely thinks, her life is close around her and it doesn't occur to her that she is waiting.

Each day she's home by eight unless she's needed overtime down at the station, and then she's there until she's no longer needed, and this is one of the reasons why more than one of her superiors have hinted that she's not far from a promotion and more responsibilities. She cannot see why she will not accept, when she's offered. This's all just part of the process she's begun.

This is her life for several weeks. Until finally she receives a telegraph from Katara and her face cracks into a smile, and her life cracks wide open.

It runs:

_AANG & TENZIN TWO DAYS AWAY. WILL BE BACK SUNDAY. PRAY YOU CAN MAKE IT. WOULD MEAN A LOT._

And the invitation means a lot to Lin. She quickly wires off her positive response, and that night she sleeps with Katara's message on her nightstand. In the morning she fastens it to the mirror in her WC. When she comes home later, she re-discovers the part of her wardrobe that is not her black armour, pyjamas, or the sets of cotton camisoles and shorts she wears between her armour and skin. She reclaims her best robe from the bottom of her armoire and a crumbling vanguard of mothballs, and she drags up her hair ornaments from the back of her vanity that she cannot remember last touching.

She puts thought into what will look good. What would match and suit the richness of the robe's material and green and golden hues. She tries the robe on, but first she must peel off her sweat-streaked camisole and shorts, her bindings, and bathe. Under the water she washes herself until her sinews strain under skin she has scrubbed pink and smarting. Then, and only then, she slips into the robe—it's a cool, sudden balm on her raw skin, more soothing than the moisturiser she has forgone to avoid staining the robe. When her hair's pinned on her head and she's found her pair of slippers, Lin stares at her image in the centre mirror of her vanity.

She does not recognise herself. But maybe it's the angle, so she steps forward and layers of silk swish and swirl around her clean body. Then she's tired and it's almost midnight, so she disrobes, and by the time she's free and once again familiar to herself, she's so sleepy that she slips beneath her covers naked, and she's asleep soon enough.

But she is awoken by a ringing phone. For a moment she's confused because why are her neigbours getting calls this early, before dawn, before _her_ alarm has gone off. And her alarm goes off early because her workday starts at eight and ends later than any of her neighbours', even though her _work _never truly ends.

Lin is confused until she realises it's Sunday, and that that is her own phone. Now she's irritated. Cursing, she gets up and skips across the cold wood floor before the fifth ring.

When she lays the receiver down, she's still irritated. But irritated by a lot of little things now. As she goes to get ready for work, she mutters to herself about no-shows.

There's a shift that suddenly needs filling down at the station, and though it is Sunday and her day off, surely she could fill in? She'll be done by ten, eleven at the latest, certainly before noon.

Lin grumbles about the flake, but she's disappointed and that's why she's pissed at herself. Apparently she just won't have time to change before going out to Air Temple Island. It shouldn't matter. But somehow it does, and this's what puts her in a truly foul mood.

…

Coming back to the city is important. Tenzin can feel that in his stomach, it is one of the many things that he feels down there just now, and everything that he is feeling is both jumbled and intricately connected, like a cramp, only he can't find the right spot to press down on to relieve the mounting pressure and the blazing pain. He will be glad to be home, he feels. It is _time_ for him to be back—he can feel that, too.

He has tried meditating a few times in the past hour to little success. He _can_ settle down, but then each time his thoughts drift towards the city he and his father will soon be approaching, and each time that happens he experiences his welcoming party over and over again. Each time it is only a little different—one time Kya is there even though he knows that she's now in the South Pole and engaged to a shipmaker; one time he inexplicably arrives at Air Temple Island at sundown even though it's currently not much past noon, and they've less than an hour to go.

All of this just makes him restless. Since he's already restless enough, and because flying a sky bison with closed eyes isn't the best idea, Tenzin ends up focussing on the sky in front of him. It's empty save for sunlight and a few white cloud tops Oogi and Appa occasionally graze.

There is a black and purple storm festering to the east, but the sun's shining above it, and Tenzin can't tell if the storm is approaching or retreating from the direction of the city. For a moment a violet-white burst of lightning illuminates a swath of the dense clouds. And _that _makes him feel restless, too.

"Faster, Oogi," he urges, and the sky bison of his roars in return. Then the great animal does pick up speed so that Tenzin's head jerks back for a moment, and Appa has to speed up too to keep pace.

Tenzin can hear his father laughing. "Getting anxious to get home, eh?"

"I'm anxious," Tenzin says, and that part is true at least. But he's not sure that he is anxious to get home—it's more like he's getting anxious because he is _away_ from home. That's almost the same, but it's different, too. Tenzin doesn't know what else to think.

But another thing making his anxious is his father and the rapidly closing end of their journey. Aang hasn't said as much, but it's apparent to Tenzin that Aang will never again be spending anywhere near two years away from Republic City. This trip had been a special exception—so is this to be the end of their exclusive bonding time?

Again, Tenzin doesn't know what to think. Though, in this case, he's wise enough and understands enough to answer his own question, however reluctant he is to know the answer.

What he lets himself figure is this: after this trip, nothing will be the same for him. Things have changed now, and he himself has changed most of all. For one thing, Tenzin's now by law considered an adult, a man grown. And—he's returning to Republic City as an airbending master. His tattoos still weep and swell and sting and itch, but he has them now and that is what matters. When he gets home, his mother will heal the irritation his body is not yet quite over.

And for now, the air up here is so cold that it soothes the inflammation that reaches from his forehead, straight over his head, and down back to the base of his neck.

.

Lin of course does not get off work until a few minutes past noon. The original officer who was supposed to come on after her is still in the hospital, and _his_ replacement's late. For family reasons. Most likely he just slept in, but Lin doesn't say that. It's not her concern yet because she's not his boss. And anyway right now her concern is getting over to Air Temple Island.

Only when she is on the ferry does she allow herself to relax. And even then she still has a pounding in her head, stiff shoulders. She still is stressed as the city recedes behind a bank of fog and the island grows greater and greater on the horizon. Beyond the island all she can see is the sky and the sea stretching out and out for a great distance until it hits a wall of black squalls sitting far out there, longer than she could walk in a day.

.

Her aunt is there to meet her.

The engines have started dying down and the hawsers have already been cast overboard and secured to bollards by two Air Acolytes before Lin surfaces on the deck of the ferry. Katara's the only one on the quayside waving, and Lin of course is the only passenger to be waved to. Lin waves back, but she lingers for a few moments on the deck, even after the gangway with solid iron rails has been put down.

She lingers, looking at the island that looms above Katara and the sea and a tiny, tiny storm somewhere far off behind it. She inhales, and it has been a year and half since she has last been here to visit. Before she had left for the academy or the South Pole, she had been on the island for seven hundred consecutive days. Also, she'd never worn armour then, and she'd never had a boyfriend.

Both of these things now are a part of her, for she has become the metalbending officer she and Tenzin had known she would become.

As she disembarks, she's sure that the swaying gangplank is going to make her sick. But it doesn't, and once she is off and returned to the earth, she embraces Katara and tells her it has been too long, truly.

"Look at you," Katara says, "a woman grown."

.

And Tenzin must think the same thing. Or at least something very similar, because as he goes to slide down from Oogi's back, he's so busy openly staring at Lin, sizing her up in a way as though he doesn't know where he recognises her from, if at all, truly—as though he could've made a _mistake_—he ends up so distracted that he gets his foot caught in his cloak and tumbles down onto his back.

Lin laughs, and the courtyard is alive with the sound of it.

She goes and stands over him. But instead of helping him, her eyebrow twitches upwards. "Still not used to your own new cloak, Master Airhead?" she asks, her hip jutting out towards him. "The older you get, the better you don't get."

"Lin," Tenzin says simply. He only says her name, but it's not a greeting or a harsh warning word to get her to lay off of him. He says her name as though it is a statement. Here she is—finally. And there he lies on his back, staring up at her in her new armour. Though, by now, her armour isn't so new. He just hasn't seen it before.

"You're staring, Tenzin."

"Lin, I—" he stops and starts. Stands up, brushes his back off. Doesn't realise that now his parents're watching him.

"Lin." He bows to her.

He is so courteous, so cordial, so amusing, so the _same_ despite the time, it's all Lin can do to bow back. She wants to kiss him, but that would never do—it simply wouldn't be enough.

"I like your tattoos," she says.

"Your armour fits you. I mean—it suits you."

And it does both—it matches her black hair that's currently pulled back into a bun touching her neck, and the metal's bent snug against every curve of her sculpted body. The armour holds her breasts in place, giving them just a little more than what they have naturally.

She puts her hand on his shoulder. Now they are touching for the first time in nearly two years. He's nineteen, and she's eighteen. The time that has spread between them dissolves as quickly, as unremarkably, as a morning mist on Yue Bay.

.

It turns out that the storm was heading _towards_ Republic City. It hits them several hours later.

…

Dinner comes and goes, and still there seems to be no break in the storm, not even an eye. So Lin must stay the night. The ferries aren't running, and Aang will not have the bison or his son or his niece flying out in this weather. Not that she is complaining.

Lin and Tenzin are still deeply engrossed in their conversation and each other's company when Katara tells them that she and Aang are retiring. Aang has to be up early for meditation and a council meeting. "I've lain out some night clothes for you, Lin. Tenzin, don't stay up too late. Lin has work tomorrow, and there's a whole list of chores you need to get around to doing, too. I also want to have another look at your tattoos tomorrow."

"Yes, Mother. Sleep well." Tenzin stands up to hug his mother and then bows to her for good measure.

Lin stands up herself. She hugs Katara longer and says, "Good night, Auntie. I don't know if I'll see you again tomorrow. Before I leave. If the ferry's running, I'll most likely be gone before you get up."

"Perhaps," Katara says. But if she means anything by that, she doesn't elaborate on it. She says, "Good night you two, and be safe," and goes out of the room.

Of course she noticed how _close_ they were siting, how telling their eye contact. Sighing, Katara wonders if she will have to check the females' or males' quarters later tonight. _Aft__er all, my son has violated those rules __for her before__._

.

Once Katara's gone, they try to resume their conversation, but neither of them can seem to recall what they had been talking about. It had been a good conversation, sure. But it's a forgotten conversation now.

"But I don't want to go to bed just yet," Lin says to him. Neither of them have gone back to sit down. "Not in a storm like this, for it is nearly as loud as the wind that used to keep me awake."

Tenzin immediately knows what she's talking about. "When we were younger."

"Yes," she says.

And then it's silent between them, and Tenzin feels like he should be doing something but he doesn't know what, if it's an action or something he's supposed to say—the way that she is _looking_ at him. Only it isn't silent between them, not really. Maybe they aren't speaking, but sixty percent of communication is body language, and their body language is communicating a lot just now. Her stance, their widened eyes, the blush that he doesn't realise is creeping up from his neck to the tips of his ears.

He fears he is too late now and that surely he has missed something, but then Lin steps forward.

"I know—let's sleep up there, in the attic. For old time's sake. We can spend as much time as we want talking without having to worry about stumbling our way back to the right room later. It'll save you a stubbed toe. Or maybe worse."

"Lin—"

"You can't say no!"

"What? Why?" Tenzin asks, accentuating the h's so many others just leave silent. Lin thinks it's endearing, though now he practically spits when speaking, worked up as he is.

"Because you can't say no to me," Lin says. She grabs onto his arm.

He says nothing. But rather than let her lead, he grabs onto _her_ arm and tries to drag her behind him, except that she's eager and follows right along. "I swear, Lin."

"What do you swear, Tenzin?"

"I—One of these days—one of these days I'm going to do—something. About this. About you."

"What about _to_ me?" They're on the staircase that's already narrow as a crack. She pushes herself into him, and he jumps. But he cannot jump away for there's no space for that, and that pleases her more than anything else has in a while.

"We'll see," he says to her after a time. They're now at the top of the stairwell, so he lets go of her and opens the trapdoor to the attic. She goes first up the ladder. He follows and closes the wooden trapdoor after them.

Up here, the storm is loud. They're in the midst of it, separated from it only by thin wooden walls, and even then the walls are not as thick as they once were, they are corroded by the salt-laden wind off of the bay.

But what Lin says is, "Hah, it looks just as I remembered it. Oh, shit—I forgot to grab my pyjamas."

"Are you tired now? I can wait, if you want to go down and get them." Tenzin offers. He does not imply that he wants to call off sleeping up here. Now that they are here, the idea has begun to appeal to him. It's an adventure of sorts—for them two, after his grand one with his father. And up here years ago, he and Lin had talked about taking a journey.

And anyway, it's time for him to spend some time with Lin.

"No," Lin says. "Your cloak will serve."

"I'm sorry?"

"Take off your cloak, Airhead."

He _looks _at her.

"Oh, for spirits' sake, grow up, Tenzin—don't look at me like that, I just said take off your cloak. I didn't tell you to _undress_. Just give me your damned cloak so I can sleep in that instead of my armour."

"You will have to take your armour off," Tenzin states.

"Indeed. And pity for you, you will have to be exposed to my _bare arms _for my underclothes don't cover them. If anyone asks, you can go ahead and tell them that I tried to seduce you with my shoulders."

Tenzin is so mortified, so red, he cannot look her when he hands her his scarlet cloak. He moves to turn around, but of course just then there is a burst of lightning, and he _sees _her armour fall off at the snap of her finger before he hears it thump heavily on the floor. Her arms are extended out. He sees the swell of her muscles, the slope of her shoulder, the curve from her back to the base of her head where her hair is still secured in a bun. It is the two of them in this dark room, and then she's covered by the piece of clothing he received when he became a master.

He swallows, and he finally understands what erotic means.

But his blood doesn't flow south for too long, it is staunched by her yawn. Despite the storm outside she's tired, and he knows that she's fighting the urge to rub her eyes.

It's infinitely endearing. And then that is something new. He raises one hand, he has never felt so fond of her before. He pauses at that. He doesn't particularly need to, and she probably won't let him ever, but he _wants_ to protect her.

"Tenzin?" she asks. Her head's cocked, and he has no idea how long he has been out of it.

He says, "Are you warm enough?"

"Yes. I'd like to sit down now."

"Sure. Sitting." _Next to you._

They do sit down, right next to each other. They are shoulder to shoulder.

Lin's fading fast. When she leans against him, Tenzin realises that she will be asleep sooner than either he or_ she_ would've thought. But it's okay, really. It's nice—just being there. Together. He eventually pulls her to him and strokes her hair. He accidentally dislodges her hairpin. He fumbles with it, trying to get it and her hair back into place, thinking he's really gone and done it now, what a sod he is for ruining this moment, whatever it is, for the both of them.

Without looking up, she says, "Just leave it."

His throat clenches, before the tension rolls off of him. "I like it better like this, anyway." It is true, he really does. It is not a cover up. He doesn't realise that he's smiling.

They're quiet for a time.

"I missed you, you know," she says, softer than she ever speaks in the daylight.

"I missed you, too." He squeezes her shoulder. He kisses her, the crown of her head. "I love you," he says into her hair.

She leans into him and speaks into his chest. _I love _you, he feels. She does not pull away.

They fall asleep like that. She wrapped in his cloak, he wrapped around her body, not shoulder to shoulder, but still hand in hand.


	9. 8

Writer's Note: fðpðdsapfðadsæfðs

I have no idea why this chapter is so freaking long. Dude, it was supposed to be only 2.000 wordsssss. And the length isn't even the reason why it took so damned long to write. I knew exactly what I wanted to cover, but the scenes just didn't want to flow.

So I wrote them instead.

Anyway, canon!scenes are going to start popping up since this is part II of the story; one of the purposes of this story is to explain why the canon scenes unfolded as they did, and what they mean in relation to Tenzin's and Lin's relationship.

But also there are teenagers getting handsy. Lol okay.

As ever, thank you for all of the beautiful feedback! *A* Seriously, I fail at expressing how much it means to me.

For a theme, I kind of thought of this song when writing, especially the last two scenes: Sæglópur by Sigur Rós. It means "lost at sea."

* * *

In the morning, Lin had woken up to a dusky, dusty, blue tile ceiling over rafters. At least the rafters hadn't been festooned with cobwebs, though her head had certainly felt stuffed full of them. But in fact there had been no cobwebs, Lin'd slowly realised. This place had to have been cleaned every so often.

Then Lin'd realised that, though she lay on a wooden floor, her neck was free of kinks. Maybe a little stiff. But no worse than what was normal.

And then she'd realised that she was sleeping on Tenzin. Her head had been lowered into his lap at some point, his back had rested against the wall the night through. Once again she had slept unsupervised with him. Her airbender.

When she'd realised that as they sat now was as much as they'd touched that night despite being in private, despite her flirting that she had distinctly remembered, despite him being a _boy_. Within a trice Lin had been endeared, amused, relieved, frustrated, her blood had run hot and her body had grown heavy and light at the same time, and she could just then imagine how much of a weight she had been on him. Then she'd laughed. The sound of it had woken him up.

"Good morning, sunshine," Lin'd said. It'd always taken Tenzin a few moments to emerge from his thick shell of sleep.

"Good morning, Lin," Tenzin'd said after a time. It'd sounded as though he would sigh next. It was hard to tell so early when everything was still so soft and he spoke so softly, anything could've been possible because the day had hardly started. But Tenzin had reached down, had cradled her chin, had run his hands up along her head to massage her temples.

Lin'd let him do that for a while. She'd closed her eyes. She'd basked in how he'd _looked_ at her the whole time.

But eventually she'd said, "I don't hear the storm. The weather's changed."

"It has."

She'd then sat up. She'd touched his shoulder and walked her fingers down his arm. "I need to go, then. Work. There's no rain to deter those nasty criminals."

"Couldn't they wait until after breakfast?" Tenzin'd asked. After he had said it, though, he'd felt extremely foolish. He'd never said things like that before. Meaningless things, or sweet things said in private. He hadn't wanted to start doing it then. He had only been nineteen.

"If only, Airhead." She'd laughed, and then gone to where her armour lay stacked and placed tidy. She'd let the scarlet cloak slip from her shoulders, her skin had looked spectral in the thin dawn light. Before the cloak had hit the ground, her armour was snapped and curved and bent back into place. She'd redone her hair as he'd watched.

Tenzin'd walked her down and waited for the ferry with her. He'd said goodbye, she'd boarded, and then the ferry'd left.

Just like that.

But then when the ferry had gone a distance and he had to airbend to reach her, he'd finally asked, "When may I see you again?"

She'd felt ridiculous and free just then, surely a sight if anyone saw them. She hadn't understood why he didn't just land on the damn deck, but stayed on his current to talk with her with a gap and the ship's side between them. And it had been impractical and melodramatic, but it had been exquisite. She'd been excited, there'd been a humming energy between them like they were part of a sketch, the lines had been substantial but still fluid, things still could've changed or could've been added or could've been taken away with a single stroke.

She'd rolled her eyes, happy that he hadn't let her go just yet. "If you want to, ask me on a date, Airhead!" She'd had to be loud to be heard over the wind from _his _airbending and the wind and the waves breaking around the boat. She'd leaned over the railing to help convey her voice.

Without having to think about it, he'd taken her up on it. He'd decided and said, "Dinner. Tomorrow."

"Pick me up at half nine! Your mother has my address."

"Right. Okay. Yes."

"See you then, Airhead." And she'd reached out a little bit farther and kissed him lightly on the forehead, and he had pretty much floated back home.

.

It isn't until later that Tenzin realises that dates cost money. As it is, eating out requires money. He has of course been told about this before. He, who has only been to state and official parties.

He doesn't have a single yuan to his name.

This, Tenzin belatedly realises, is very much a problem. And something Lin will have a good time with when she inevitably learns about it. How impractical can you be, Airhead! she would say. She would say other things, and she would laugh at him, and then she would say that she will pay.

Tenzin groans. Tenzin huffs. Tenzin airbends. Tenzin doesn't notice the Air Acolytes he's leading in meditation staring at him. He is too involved for the moment.

Lin isn't allowed to pay for him. For _them._ He's invested in this principle as though it could throw off the balance of the cosmos if he allows it to be violated. So, after meditation, he goes to ask his father for advice. And, if his father can help him, where can he get his hands on a few yuan?

Tenzin realises, too, that he will have to postpone their date until he has figured out how to approach this awkward hurdle.

…

"Sweetie," Aang said as he walked into the kitchen. He was carrying the last large armful of soiled dishes and cups and chopsticks used at dinner. He put them down in the sink and only the red bowls on top showed above the surface of the foamy water.

"Thank you for the help," Katara said. She recognised the slightly worried, slightly wistful, slightly entreating tone to her husband's endearment. She knew that he wanted to talk about something, in private. That was probably part of the reason why he had volunteered to help with cleaning up, dismissing Tenzin to go off and do whatever his airbending heart pleased, so long as he_ enjoyed_ the free time. Whatever this something was had probably been on Aang's mind throughout dinner, nagging and heavy and more bothersome than it should've been because he had been so close to Katara, yet so close to his kid, too.

"What is it, Sweetie?" Katara asked.

"It's our son. Again." Anag picked up an extra dish rag and began scrubbing down a plate he fished from the bottom of the sink's basin.

"Tenzin?"

"Yes," Aang said.

"Here, Sweetie—take this cloth, okay? I'll clean and you dry. Now, what about Tenzin?"

"He asked about money for a date. Well, he didn't ask _me_ for money, though he could've. He asked about money for a date and how to go about getting enough."

"What did you tell him?"

Aang dried one, two dishes. Stacked them, thought. "I don't know. Stuff."

"You obviously told him something, dear," Katara said. She stopped for a moment, set her rag down, squared her hips toward her husband. Confronted for a proper answer, Aang continued wiping down the bowl in his hands and kept his eyes on his work.

"Airbenders don't earn money," Aang said simply.

"What about the salary the Air Acolyte draws as the Air Nation councilman?"

"You know that goes directly to charity," Aang said. He looked up at Katara then.

"Yes," Katara said. She turned back to her work. She cleaned an entire plate with a quick practical stroke and set the dish to the side on top of another, beginning a backlogged pile for Aang to catch up on. "But he does still earn it, technically. He just doesn't use it on himself. Let Tenzin earn some money. He won't spend it for himself, we know that."

"But it doesn't _have _to cost him anything to take someone on a date. There's this entire island, and your wonderful cooking. And there's plenty of free travelling entertainment in the city. Though I guess donating to the street performers he watched could count—" Aang was saying, with his chin held in one wet hand.

"Sweetie, you know how Tenzin is. He's trying to do what he thinks is right, and that's to be a proper gentleman. He's trying to show that he's serious about this."

"But he wants more than a meager sum. He has his mind set on this new restaurant—" And Aang stopped to set his damp drying cloth and dripping bowl down. Without thinking about it, he airbent several dishes dry. He was getting into this conversation now, so much so that he was quite into it before he realised it. He had principles and his son had principles—and he just wanted his son to relax every so often. Or even just once, this one time, for dates were _supposed _to be fun. His dates with Katara had been fun. His dates with Katara were still fun, even as his biological clock ticked closer and closer to forty-eight.

"He wants to treat her properly," Katara said, and she could've meant multiple things with that. What she said next was, "Let him do as he wants. As long as he's reasonable, let's let him alone. He's not dating us."

Aang picked up his rag again and resumed drying the remaining dishes. The dish in his hands just then was small and still wet, and the one that he himself had had his miso broth in. "I guess he'll be fine. He's definitely inherited his father's talent with the ladies," Aang said, and by the time he got to "talent," he was smiling. His head tilted over the sink, his happy self-satisfaction lit up the lattice of wrinkles between his beard and eyes.

"Oh, no, you didn't," Katara said, turning towards him. Her husband continued drying, catching up finally with the work that she had stacked up for him. "You didn't tell him the marble trick would work, did you?"

He only smiled as he reached for a cup. "Sweetie, it's my marble _technique. _And I told him the truth—it's a surefire way to impress the ladies, but he's got to have the charm to keep'em interested."

"A—"

"And I told him not to worry. For him, the hardest part's already over," Aang finished. He disposed of his rag dramatically and set down the last cup with ceremonious care, he walked over and touched the small of his wife's back and leaned in, he lowered his voice to emphasise—"She already has his heart in the bag. He won't be getting away from her."

Katara threw _her_ dish rag at her husband's face. "You're still a romantic sap, you know that?" He laughed, airbent the rag and water off of his face, moved, and swept Katara up in his arms.

"You tell me, Sweetie," Aang said.

…

"He's doing _what_?" Lin practically screeches at Katara. Lin sounds both younger and older, immature and overly, outrageously angry. It's all Katara can do to keep Lin bodily down to finish healing her newest wound. "Is that why he's been saying he doesn't have time to go out?"

"Tenzin's working to earn money for your date. Now, Lin, please lay back down and keep still. I'm not done yet," Katara says. She pushes down on the girl's good shoulder, tries to ease her back down without having to disturb the flow of her glowing, revitalizing water. At the moment Katara is working on repairing an injury that has cut Lin's left shoulder deeply. It's a little surprising how little shrapnel Katara has managed collect so far, given the intricate pattern of damage she's found.

Katara worries that the young girl will boil her healing water to steam, or even possibly turn around and snap at her with bared teeth and something sinister livid in her eyes, but after a moment Lin yields and goes limp on the bed. Pressing her head into the clean sheets, Lin mutters, "That idiot."

"That idiot is my son," Katara states.

"Well, he is one." Lin is restless, she looks to the side. She crosses her ankles and rubs her feet together to get at an itch on the back of her heel that's quite unreachable. "An insecure idiot."

"He's just trying to be proper. You know how he is."

"Serious," Lin says. "Stupid. Stuck-up. Stubborn. I can't believe Uncle Aang was ever like—_this._" Before the "this," Lin almost bites her tongue as Katara suddenly applies an unfathomable amount of pressure to her wound. Then Lin cries out, sounding small and defeated as a child instantly quelled by a fearsome parent.

"Lin—sorry," Katara says quickly. Doesn't pull away, but she does pull back a fraction and grimace. "I have no idea what happened to your shoulder, but it's a lot worse than just a cut. Some of your muscles have been severed."

"Can you fix it?" Lin doesn't hesitate to ask. She struggles to tilt her head towards Katara, clutches at the sheets beneath her to brace against the pain.

There's a pause as Katara considers earnestly.

"Yes," Katara says eventually. "I can reconnect them."

"Then, pleas-ah, please," Lin gasps. How she is going to wreck Tenzin after this! Of course it's not his fault that she was hurt at work and hurt in the line of duty, that's a job hazard she_ knew_ she was signing on for, but she imagines curb stomping Tenzin all the same, grinding his face into the ground, it helps her channel and manage her pain.

The earth beneath the temple's foundations tremors slightly.

She will bust his bones, she will break his back, she will shatter his skull, she will smash his shins—and he will _feel_ her pain.

And then she sobs out, chokes, gasps, and finally Katara jerks away. "I'm done, Lin. Just breathe. It's going to hurt for a bit. Your nerves aren't happy."

Lin says nothing, glazed with a fine layer of shock. She's breathing though, slowly, with a slight raspy wetness from an excess of saliva in her mouth. Katara hears it. With a splash, Katara replaces the water she's used on Lin back into its ceramic bowl, though now it's less water than it is a vaguely noisome mixture of blood, skin, bodily fluids, and foreign debris. The surface of the liquid in the bowl is slick, thick, and fibrous.

Katara clears out the bowl in another room as Lin recovers. When she returns, Lin's sitting up and taking in her newest, rawest scar.

"It's a nasty one," Katara says, coming up to Lin again. She reaches out, letting her hand hover over the faintly shiny scar tissue.

"I get to add another one to the collection," Lin says. She moves to re-wrap her bindings. But Katara seizes her wrist and shakes her head.

"Don't move so much yet."

"But—"

"But nothing, Lin," Katara says. She takes Lin's clothes out of Lin's immediate reach. Only when the girl sits back down and is plainly waiting does Katara come back with the girl's bindings and shirt. Which she herself puts on Lin. It all takes a bit of maneouvering for Lin's left arm is useful for nothing save hanging and getting in the way. "I know you have today off. It won't take too long, I promise. Let me give you a pedicure—you'll be good to go then."

"But, Auntie—" Lin tries to fold her arms over her chest, but only her right arm makes it, her left arm flops a bit in a way that is comical when seen on mummers, but otherwise her repaired muscles just aren't ready to keep up with her yet.

Lin gives her feeble left arm a dark look, but Katara is not subjected to her bad mood. "Well," Lin says.

"I'll go get the foot bath." Katara smiles and leaves the room again and Lin watches her.

Lin's subdued through the entire process. Even when she flinches and twitches through parts of it, she's vaguely reminiscent of a broken-in ostrichhorse. It's quite obvious that she finds most of these sensations on her feet unpleasant if not approaching torturous. Especially when Katara grinds a light porous stone into large patches of long-dead skin on Lin's heels, her soles, the tiny pads of each of her ten toes. Lin thinks that Katara would have better luck trying to grate diamonds with shale, but with enough rough love and diligence and soaking, Katara's able to remove most of the Lin's rough cracked, dirt-crusted skin. The scented water turns from pellucid, to yellow, to grey, to opaque black. Both of her feet emerge soft and clean and more pink than brown. Lin marvels at that.

"Wow," Lin admits. "That's _amazing_."

"You're welcome."

"And you did it without a bit of bending."

"Indeed I did," Katara says, reaching for the nail trimmers. When she has shaped Lin's toenails into unremarkable uniform crescents, she spreads Lin's toes and sticks tufts of cotton in between them. She pulls up a phial of jade green nail varnish and shakes it vigorously.

"No," Lin says flatly. She pulls back her feet. "That's too much. You've done enough."

"Nonsense," Katara says without looking up at Lin. She puts down the phial, pulls Lin feet back in front of her, and picks the phial back up. "Let me finish my job. You know, your mother and I had our feet done together a few times."

"Auntie—"

"Stay still. Besides, this shade matches your eyes.

Lin is quiet for a moment, lets Katara paint her nails. She doesn't think about it too much beyond, _My mum's laughing at me somewhere._

She's uncomfortable but tries not to shift.

Then, when Katara's on her second foot, it clicks and something snaps, and the obvious comes suddenly crashing down on her like a particularly nasty mudslide—a shade that matches her eyes. Of nail varnish. Matching _her_ eye colour.

"Tenzin bought this." It is not a question.

Katara says, "Here, you're almost done. Two more nails, and then a little wait while they dry, and you'll be good to go."

Lin tries to think about anything else that isn't Tenzin walking into a shop and spending money on her. Buying something that she would never think to purchase for herself. He had put _thought_ into it—and the idea of it makes her feel physically sick and swimmy.

Lin can't wait. Once Katara has applied the last stroke to the last nail Lin reaches the limit of how long she can keep herself down. Lin pushes up with the heels up her feet, bends on her belt with the twin spools of metal, and she marches outside.

It only takes her a moment to find _him_—she saw him re-painting one of the outer compound walls with some others when she'd arrived a few hours ago. The sun has shifted and several acolytes have moved on to other chores, but he is still there with a handful of acolytes, the wall is not yet finished. He sees her, smiles, waves. But isn't coming down.

She fixes that.

With her good arm she shoots out a metal chord and snatches him around his broad waist. With an exaggerated jerk, she pulls him over to her. By the time he realises what's going on, all he can do is airbend to gain his balance.

"Lin?" Tenzin asks. He almost adds, What are you doing? for something bad is coming, but his concern for preventing her from making a scene is drowned out by his concern for her obviously paralysed arm.

She points to her bare toes. "What's this?" she asks.

He seems confused for a moment, but he says, "Ah—a gift."

She pauses. She lets him go and then gets up in his face. And she is not much shorter than him. He knows that, but it's always surprising when she almost reaches his height and then towers right over him.

His dripping paintbrush hangs limply in his hand. He is mortified, knows that a brutal beating or berating is _coming, _but her left arm hangs at her side, he saw it move in little spurts and jerks but he didn't see it bend, and that does something to him. It's more profound than worry—his arms are just as immobile as her one is, the things that he wants to say itch in his throat like so many sinking, scuttling, scattering centipedes.

"Listen here, Mr. Man. You're _not_ to buy me anything, ever again, unless I ask you for it. And I won't be asking you for _anything_. Do you get that? _Don't buy me anything_. And this date business—look, you can work and earn money if you want. Whatever. Peachy for you. But you are not to work for our date—your mother told me that is why you've been blowing me off! It's taking away from our time together, and I won't have you paying, and I just want to _see_ you," she says.

Standing there in the open courtyard, in open daylight, in open confrontation, she kisses him.

This's the first time that several of the acolytes learn that _that_ is going on. They hadn't heard about the dating. They try to mind their own business, but they watch—their own kids, after all, will probably end up being taught by a spawn of those two teenagers.

Lin pulls away. "So cut the crap and just spend time with me, okay?"

"Okay," Tenzin says. He enjoys the kiss so much that it doesn't occur to him that his dignity and plans are now picked apart, derailed, blown up, and scattered. He's burning with embarrassment and his heart aches and he feels like an idiot and he wishes that she were not so challenging, of course. He just likes looking at Lin and focusses on that. She is pretty. She's so stunning, even when she has put nothing into her appearance at all.

He decides then that he loves her cheekbones. He lifts one hand to the side of her face to touch one. His other hand slowly grazes over her left arm, imparting his wish for her to _Ple__ase take care, this is precious to me._

"I'm sorry, Lin. Are you feeling okay? Are you hurt? Let's talk about this."

"Later," she says.

"When?"

"Later," she repeats. "You're picking me up tomorrow at half nine. Come to my place. Now hurry up and get back to your work. I need to finish my pedicure, and my arm is still out. This last job did a number on my shoulder."

...

She didn't notice him checking up on the next day as she worked. Nor would she notice his observation in the days to come.

...

"Lin."

She turns around, and he is in her open window. She knows that he isn't hovering or floating, he is airbending to stay up, but even though she knows this, when she sees him she imagines the empty space between the darkened street and his feet. He must be suspended effortlessly in mid-air by something spiritual—he'd know what it was. It's as though she doesn't hear the wind from his airbending, as though she doesn't notice that he's not standing perfectly still.

She's not sure why he's airbending just now. Is he trying to be romantic? It wouldn't be like him to show-off, but this dating business has done strange things to his behaviour. She thinks that for sure he must be doing it for her benefit, but she does not find it impressive. Rather it makes her roll her eyes—it seems quite puerile, he is doing too much. She should tell him not to try so hard, next time. Though it also makes her want to punch him, and _that_ is her family's way of showing affection.

"Tenzin. Good of you to make it."

"Good evening. May I come in?"

"Knock yourself out, Airhead."

He comes in through the window, lands lightly on his feet, and the air current that has been holding him up dies off. Though before it's completely gone, it rustles her curtains, the orchid on her nightstand, her dress, her loose hair.

Now close to her, Tenzin gets a good look at her in the bright light from her electric lamp. She has recently washed her hair, he can see that some sections of it are damp and heavy, and she has brushed it but not pinned it up, letting it hang and fall where it will. She has on a simple green cheongsam lined with brown piping. There's an exotic bird picked out in stitches on the left sleeve, and he sees the pattern by the shadows cast by the stitching. The embroidered collar dips down into a neckline that reveals the tips of the wings of her collarbones.

Tenzin says, "Hey," as he crosses the room and closes the distance between them. He puts his hand on her forearm. He means to lean in and kiss her, but somewhere along the way he gets lost admiring her. Gets distracted by the sharp shape and shadows of her cheekbone.

"Hey, there," she says, smiling back before getting to the point. "Ready for our first date?"

"Absolutely," he says.

She laughs and steps away. "All right, lover boy. I'll meet you by the door. Let me just grab the picnic."

He does as he's told. Then, a few minutes later, she's ready to go, and they head out. So far, this try is going well, and she's not shy about claiming this as an achievement.

.

Tenzin does not know what to say.

What he does know is what he shouldn't say, which happens to be the exact thing he is currently thinking.

"Lin," he says.

"Don't say it, Tenzin." She scowls at him. "Don't you dare patronise me. At least I got us out and got us food."

"No, it's wonderful," he says, and he smiles at her. "You're wonderful." He leans across the bench, touches her hair, kisses her forehead just above her black brow.

She laughs, a little derisively at herself, but he feels her relaxing, her guard coming down once she realises that he won't criticise her, that he really truly doesn't _care_.

For their picnic Lin had packed some leftovers from the top of her icebox and thought nothing of it. And that had been her mistake—not thinking. Specifically not thinking about Tenzin, not minding him, and packing a lifetime vegetarian a meat-based meal.

If he could've, he would've eaten her leftovers. Any of her leftovers, or all of the leftovers she ever cared to leave him. For her, he'd eat anything that he was capable of digesting.

So they have to adjust—she takes the spiced chickendillo meat and leaves him with the plants.

While he picked at the re-heated, soggy rice, she smiles ironically at him. Obviously pleased and amused, but more than that, more profound—how she feels about him trying to save her embarrassment by accepting a compromise—she thinks that he is kind of a chump. "You're such a gentleman, Tenzin," she says between bites. It is a compliment, but also an admission—this mistake somehow apparently is karma, but he doesn't bring this up and turn it into a lesson despite how easy it would be for him.

She knows that she should've been a little nicer when she confronted him yesterday. She would've been a bit more mindful, and sensitive, aware of _why_ he had done what he had done (or tried to do, before she had stopped him).

It had been for her.

"I was raised by two amazing people," Tenzin says.

"Oh no," Lin says as she points a chopstick square at his chest. "Don't bring your parents into this. Give yourself some credit. Hell, Tenzin, you were practically a gentleman when you were eleven." She takes a bite, chews, swallows.

He watches her throat.

"I'm not saying you raised yourself. But your personality—you're extremely genteel."

He puts his container of rice down and looks at Lin.

They have come to a park that Lin seems familiar with. There's a pond beside them, a handsome tended footpath and fresh spring grass at their feet. Buds and tentative, unfurling leaves on the trees are above them. One day soon, the leaves will realise that spring is well under way. They will let the warmth in and burst into green verdant life until the time comes to don mature autumnal colours in the fall. _That_ is inevitable. The lamps lighting the park are gas and flames controlled by a man and his simple pole. He passes through each morning and each evening, and he is currently blessing their section of the park with the light that it is his duty to bring.

In the soft flickering gas lamplight Lin is still Lin, but in the diffuse light there are hidden parts of her that are revealed, Tenzin sees, things that he only glimpses in the harsh daylight—for these things are subtle things, small glimmers of a character that she does her best to conceal. She is a surface that is suddenly illuminated, her finer textures suddenly salient when thrown into relief.

He thinks of her as a geode. Rough on the outside, she splits open before him. Her skin glows, her eyes glow, her lips are a soft glossy pearl pink in low light, or slivers of rose quartz. Shadows pass over her face as the lamplight shifts. Shadows pass over her face as her eyes follow him while he dips down to find her hand and take it in his own.

He just can't take her in enough, he just can't get over her. He smiles softly, softly, squeezes her hand to _convey_.

She is light, and he is in love with her light, and he is in love with her everything else that she is—her stability, her substance, her groundedness, her spirit, her fullness, her coolness, her smirk that can both make him crazy with uncertainty and drive him quite wild. She is earth, she is vast and she is eternal. She can be a balm for him, a soothing compact of soil and moss to dress a wound—which is an ancient, simple, universal thing. She is the loam from which new life will rear.

He knows how overwrought it all is even as it is in his head.

What he says to her is, "I love you."

"I know that, Airhead," she says. Smiling, she presses her hand to his chest and drags her fingers lightly over his heart. Though he can't feel her touch, he shivers at the gesture—_this is mine_.

She knows the effect that she has on him. She revels in it, treasures it. And he feels that she will steady it, and protect it, and nurture it in her own way.

Then she pulls back, licks her lips, and laughs. "You shouldn't kiss me, Airhead. I just ate meat."

"Then let's dance."

She frowns. "I don't dance."

But she _does. _He's seen her at his father's functions. He was her teaching partner, his mother their instructor; he has danced with her countless times. It's just that she doesn't like it. Has never—she claims that dancing isn't what her feet are meant for. (Though maybe his are, after all, there's a practical use for airbending, she's said.)

"Then, let me." What he does is lift her up by her waist for the first time before she can process _that_, and he doesn't set her down for the next few minutes. He gives her a current of air to ride and guides her the entire way through.

She is breathless. Hanging onto him is all that she can do.

And when it is over, she says nothing as he smiles so widely at her.

She pushes him back, she pushes him down, and she kisses him and kisses him down into the ground. Past the top of her head he can see her bend a shelter around them. They are safe from prying eyes in a black womb of earth.

In her element, Lin controls him like wet clay. She molds him to her will and pleasure, shaping and teasing and pulling and pushing to get what she wants. He struggles, but he is nothing against her solidness—her _power _that she possesses and uses. She smirks and smiles into her kisses, and at some point tongues and spit and teeth become involved. He tastes blood and dirt in his mouth.

As she clamps down on his mouth and hips as she shakes, she makes him tremor beneath the force of her, and his tremors run deep, deep down into the years.

**…**

.

.

.

Lin did not know why she had received the invitation from Councilman Tarrlok.

As a feint? As a truce? As a formal fuck-you? To be sure he was a smiling politician with a cultivated pleasantness, and that made him the worst kind in her mind— he was a shameless viper, happy to laugh or joke or apologise or explain away any unpleasantness he had caused, whether it be a spilt drink or a split skull. They both left roughly the same impression on him.

Tarrlock wasn't the kind of man who had parties to have parties. He wasn't the kind of man who simply sent out invitations to friends and acquaintances _because_.

For one thing, this party was for the Avatar. Quite obviously, he had found a way for her to be useful to him—probably something to do with vigilante justice the equalists so clearly deserved but that the law—her _law__—_was too lacking to deliver in a timely, meaningful manner. The city was calling for _something _soon, anything at all to reassure them that something was being done in response to Amon's latest move.

The thought made Lin's skin crawl and her blood boil beneath her smooth, cool armour.

No doubt Tarrlock was aware of her regard of this new Avatar, non-existent as it was. So Lin figured that was the _why_ for the invitation: he could put her in the company of the Avatar. Of course the police would need to be present at the party because of the rebel threat—safety and peace and propriety are all important for order. But the party didn't require _her_ presence specifically, not without a personal invitation.

The Avatar would be there. No doubt her mentor would be there, too, to _chaperone_ her.

The invitation sat on Lin's work desk all week, between an old notice about minor renovations and a hideous paperweight one of her officers had given her. The invitation remained untouched. She would've ripped the scented, gilded piece of trash up if she could have.

Instead, Lin opted to wear her armour to the party. Whether invited or not, it mattered no longer—she would be in attendance, and she would be working. So she would need to be in uniform and have the necessary protection in case anything happened. She needed to be prepared to do her job.

She smirked to herself in her mirror as she arranged her hair in her preferred style, two grey sloping waves that framed her face and kept it out of the way of her metalbending. She felt _safe_ in her armour as always, even if it had never truly offered enough protection.

But, for tonight, it would be more than perfect.


	10. 9

Writer's note: So, I had to think about this for a bit, but I have decided that this chapter does not warrant a rating bump. However, the content of chapter eleven _will_ cause the rating of this story to jump to M. That said, please be aware that this chapter is **possibly triggering** for victims of both attempted rape and rape.

The dance that Tenzin and Lin are doing is called the Charleston. Look it up for a bit of fun! Also, at some point I will be writing a detective!side story for my tie-in series based on this chapter. It will be a Holmesian type tale with Lin and Tenzin partnering up to take on some criminals. I believe that in episode 6 when Lin asks Tenzin if it will be like old times, she is referring to when she and Tenzin were a super special awesome crime fighting pair.

Fsajfkasf faslf the things Linzin does to me.

* * *

After a string of quite successful dates, Tenzin realised that he had a problem. Or maybe they had a problem—he couldn't really be quite sure how to frame it. But, either way, he felt as though they were quickly running out of things to talk about.

He had noticed after their first official date, when they were out together longer, and were actually talking, and were much more casual with each other. And their dates in general were more casual now: as per their "agreement," as Lin called it, Tenzin did not buy anything for her without her express permission to treat her to something. And true to her word, Lin did not ask him for anything at all, not even for a personal loan of a few yuan for a small thing that caught her fancy. Tenzin also did not spend money on _them_—as both of them understood it, spending money on the two of them as a couple unequivocally violated the needing permission from Lin bit.

But for all that, things had gone well, escalating from rutting in the dirt in a dark park, to proper picnics and productive make out sessions on Oogi's back. And the sessions were productive for both of them. Lin felt as though Tenzin was finally reciprocating her affections that went beyond an horrendously cutesy kid crush, and Tenzin was making progress on realising how much he enjoyed moving beyond an horrendously cutesy kid crush. He still had it, of course, and he blushed more often than Lin and was palpably more sentimental, but he was understanding more and more why his male friends and his brother Bumi would call him lucky with a mystifying mixture of resignation, respect, jealousy, good sportsmanship, and a gleam in their eyes. Especially Bumi, whose attention always seemed to Tenzin to linger on Lin—particularly on her bum if he was judging correctly.

Lin had a slender waist that Tenzin enjoyed holding so much, he had practically committed holding it to muscle memory. She had sharp cheekbones, shapely lips, and sleek eyes. She was lissome to boot, and _that_ was something that was playing a larger role in his dreams about her. Lin was just glad that kissing Tenzin wasn't any longer a purely emotional cathartic experience, a serious declaration, or whatever big thing it was that he made it out to be. It was now just fun.

On their dates Tenzin supplied food he'd either made alone, with an acolyte, or sometimes prepared with his mother when he cared to cater to Lin's carnivorous tastes. Other times Lin supplied what she called leftovers. Often times, though, what she provided as leftovers were meals she had deliberately bought in advance. The two of them went to parks, went on flights with Oogi, they stargazed from atop nearby mountains, they citygazed from atop new skyscrapers, they kissed, they enjoyed music, they surfed along electric wires, they discovered together that Tenzin particularly enjoyed Lin's chest, whether as a place to rest his head or a place to rest his hand for a moment. Correspondingly Lin enjoyed resting her hand on his arse, which she affectionately called his windmaker. Though that particular nickname was quite short-lived, it was one of her several more memorable ones.

But, for all of these good bits, there was this matter that was making Tenzin pensive. Or, rather, the absence of a certain matter was making Tenzin worry: Lin was not talking about her job.

It didn't seem to be defensive, but it was definitely deliberate. For one thing, Lin would not bring up anything related to her work on her own, avoiding even news items that involved the police. As though the police were anathema to her.

When prompted by Tenzin, she would oblige him and answer that work was fine, of course, who do you think I am? I am probably closer to a promotion today than I was yesterday, for I am doing everything asked of me. No, no injuries since the last time I visited your mother for healing.

Beyond these general things, she seemed only to have a perfunctory interest in her own work. She would soon change the subject. Even plain weather that had been holding steady all week was more interesting.

Tenzin could not help feeling shut off and shut out, as though Lin was purposefully keeping him and this part of her life mutually exclusive—and it was a very large part of her life. He knew how much it meant to her. She had always been so open about her plans for the police force before.

So now he was worried that, sooner rather than late, they would run out of things to talk about. He was certain that he could only talk about what was going in his life so many times before Lin got bored and told him to just shut up already.

…

_The earth is alive._

How was one to teach this concept to a child? Even if the child_ was_ an earthbender?

The only methods Toph could come up with were too frightening for both her and her daughter. Complete darkness, complete silence, complete isolation, sheer stress—she could not expose her own daughter to such things. Not when it was her duty to protect her.

Toph had to think about it for a long time.

She thought about it so long, sometimes she regretted that her daughter was a bender at all. Would Lin's life not be better, more simple, if she did not have this ability? In, a way, too, she could imagine her daughter happier without bending—without her mother's legacy, she truly would be free to become who she wanted free of any stifling influences. From the time her little girl made the earth tremble beneath her, Toph was illimitably proud, and never able to fully put her worries to rest.

That is to say, she was always apprehensive for any number of reasons. Would that, what if, how come, could it be—so many conditionals, so much uncertainly about a daughter she loved so much.

And then one day Lin had simply taken on her mother's legacy.

After watching a sparring session between her parents, Lin came up to Toph and said, "Mum, I saw the earth's heartbeat." Lin had merely observed and copied her mother. Just like that.

Toph had never seen herself cry. Lin, however, saw her mother cry twice, and this had been the first of the two times.

…

As in so many other things, there's nothing Tenzin can do to stop her.

Tenzin finds out that Lin has made dinner reservations for them at Chong's. He finds out only hours before the time the reservations are actually for, despite the fact that he knows Chong's is the kind of place where reservations must be made three weeks in advanced, and that's assuming that you've at least got an impressive title to begin with. It's a newer restaurant headed by a relatively unknown cook, but it's already a place that's frequented by a group of people known as "society". Tenzin himself is familiar with much of society because of his father's functions, which society call brilliant, marvellous, or envious galas. And these functions were also evenings during which Lin would happily pass hours pointing and coming up with witticisms for every society member benevolent enough to grace the event with his or her presence.

Tenzin doesn't know why Lin would voluntarily spend time in the company of these people. Tenzin also doesn't know what Lin expects from him. She's on the other end of the wire, but he can just imagine how amused she must look right now.

He frowns into the telephone receiver. He can't stop her. Nor can he understand her.

"Well?" She says after a time. Her voice is right in his ear, but it is tinny and artificial, he does not imagine that she is whispering over his shoulder. "Say something."

"I don't know what to say, Lin. How long have you been planning this?"

"Planning? If you mean how long have I had the reservations, it's been a while. It was supposed to be a surprise," she says.

Tenzin can feel himself growing red, his temper, his disappointment, his frustration. "Oh, yes, it is a surprise to be sure, Lin. Frankly, I assume you didn't tell me until now because you knew I wouldn't be happy," he says.

"Did you consider that I could've possibly just wanted to do something nice for you?"

Tenzin leans forward, his mouth opens, but he holds back his immediate protest. He wants to say, _Haven't you ever thought that I just want to do something nice for you?_, but he doesn't because this is different. Lin has been clear with him that she doesn't want him spending money on her. She has been clear that he spending his time on her is what she wants, and that is what she gets. _He_, on the other hand, has never delineated such boundaries. He'd assumed that it went without saying, but apparently not. He will have to talk to her about this.

So, for now, Lin is buying him dinner. For _them_.

He is trying to let that sink in through his bristled skin when Lin says, "Well?"

Her voice is distorted, but still he thinks that he can hear a shift in the quality of it. She doesn't want to be fighting, and neither does he, but now that this is started and has been brought out, there has to be a conclusion.

What Tenzin does is try not sigh as he says, "It's extremely inconvenient of you to tell me only now, when I hardly have time to prepare adequately."

There's a slight pause on her end, before she comes back with a quip. "Oh, quit whining. What're you going to do, wax your entire head? It shouldn't take you longer than me to get ready, and I can certainly manage it." Lin laughs.

"We'll see, Tenzin says.

There's another slight shift in Lin's voice that makes her sound softer, though now it really could just be the shifty quality of the connection, and she asks, "So see you there at half nine?"

"It's a date," he says.

.

Though both of them are a little bit late and almost end up losing their table, dinner ends up pleasant. Lin has told the staff beforehand to remove all alcohol-glasses from the table, and not even a wineglass is seen throughout the three courses of the entire meal. Tenzin does not bring up Lin's work because he doesn't think to, not been the recent news of his brother Bumi he shares with her, and her history of one of the musicians who will be playing tonight. Between courses two and three, too, Tenzin's very content to lean back into the plush booth and simply take in Lin.

He has noticed that since he has come back to Republic City, Lin has taken to wearing her hair down. He can't be sure why that is unless he actually asks her, but he suspects that it has something to do with him, for he remembers that at some point, he and she had been together and he had said that he liked her hair better when it was down. It had been night when he had said that, and it hadn't been too long after he had gotten back to the city, perhaps six weeks ago? Regardless, it had been true then and it was true now, she is gorgeous with her hair up, but she is a little more gorgeous with it down around her face and shoulders and back. He hasn't gotten a good look at it in good light yet, but he's sure her dress is nice too.

She smiles at him. Underneath the table she rests her hand on his thigh. Squeezes."This isn't so bad, is it?"

"Not at all," he says.

She's smirking now, and he gets the feeling that she loves not being a destitute woman. He thinks something vague about not being overly proud or prideful or confident, but she is enjoying this moment and he is enjoying it too.

The third course is a portion of vegetable stew so sparing it would not be called a course at any other restaurant. It could not even be called an appetizer. Neither is it hot or even warm, but cold.

The stew is delicious, of course.

When he's done with that and waiting on a refill of water in a glass that seems too small in the first place, the band comes out. They begin playing. And they play well, and by the time they've finished their first number, it's as if the dim lighting has been brightened a thousand fold and society has been replaced by normal folk, the atmosphere is much more alive and a score of couples have discovered that there is a dance floor in this place.

He and Lin watch them dance through the second song.

Then, after he has gotten his refill and the second song has finished, he smiles at Lin and stands up. Extends to her his hand.

"May I have this dance?"

"Sorry, sir, but this lady doesn't dance."

"Unfortunately, I do not see any ladies here," Tenzin says, smiling still. Lin is certainly not the only one who can play games, "I only see a certain Lin Beifong, who is a childhood friend of mine, and whose musical tastes I am passingly acquainted with. As it happens, I seem to recall that she was a fan of this particular modern style of music."

He can feel his heart beating in his head, he can hear the start of the third song and what is the beginning of the next set, and he smiles even wider as Lin finally gives him her hand.

"You're insufferable," she says as they walk to the dance floor, hand in hand.

"And you, Lin, are stubborn."

"Hey, I'm the earthbender here," she says, smiling unironically. She bumps her shoulder into his.

"As though that means anything. I know you're stubborn, and yet I know that you can move like an airbender," he says.

"Perhaps," she says and laughs in his face.

He drops his hand down between her shoulder blades and she takes his shoulder. They have to wait one, two, three counts to find the beat, and then they join in on the dance with the couples around them, pulling back and forth, spinning this way and then that way, pulling side to side, moving with co-ordinated feet, tapping feet and swinging knees, moving at a pace that was considered scandalous in half of the world a few decades ago; in the Fire Nation it would have been a crime against the head of government, in the Earth Kingdom it would have been a cause of concern for parents.

But here they are together, now, and that has a lot to do with _his _father. Tenzin pulls her up against him, and this moment is full of a pride and a joy that are warm and great and surge within him with the crescendo of the song.

Then the second song of the set starts, and she laughs as he pulls her closer for she nearly steps on his toes with her heels. She swings into him suddenly and pulls them to the side, such that Tenzin has to airbend with his foot to keep them from crashing into another couple. Though his airbending causes _her_ dress to flare up behind her, she laughs at _him_.

"Want to share the view, eh?" she asks. "I'm sure someone is thanking you for that."

He says nothing but pulls them into a fast part of this song, and she comes right along, twisting and pumping and stomping right until the finale. He pulls her one last time, and she ends sweaty and heaving and smiling right up against him, their hands hopelessly entwined. They stare at each other as people around them applaud the band. Then they join the applause, too, their eyes never leaving the other.

A vocalist joins the band for the next set, so things are a little slower after that. Tenzin and Lin are practically plastered together, moving at a softer pace. But the energy that has grown and blossomed between them is still there, and it stays for a good time afterwards.

It's part of the reason why Lin is still glowing after they leave the restaurant at a time well past Tenzin's curfew. The night's well on and a chill wind brings the breath of the ice-bound mountains down upon the city, and a fog has crawled over the bay. If not for the profuse heat in her body, Lin's coat would not be enough to keep her warm. How Tenzin's cloak manages to keep him warm is not something that she understands. It seems a little funny, but she doesn't question it.

Instead she enjoys the night—the sharp, still, silent stars, the sharp slap of the cold on her face. There is this livid contrast between hot parts of her and freezing parts of her that makes her feel extraordinarily alive.

"Thank you for coming with me, despite the short notice," she says after a while. "I had a good time."

"Thank you for dancing with me," he says, earnest. "I had a lovely time, too."

They are quiet for a bit. Though they are still smiling, as Tenzin walks with her in the general direction of her apartment. He has it in his mind that they will eventually get there regardless of whether or not he pays attention to the landmarks along the way. Right now he is focussed on Lin utterly. He feels her even if he is not touching her, is not facing her. Sometimes she is walking beside him, sometimes she is walking in front of him—but never behind him, he's sure of that. When he closes his eyes for a moment he envisions her as a neon wind moving around him.

Then, right as her extra warmth burns out and she begins to shake and well before her teeth start to chatter, he takes one extra step to close the distance between them and tucks her right arm into his. Not stopping, she leans into him.

"We make quite a team, don't we?" she asks.

"Yes. Just like the good old days," he says.

She thinks about that for a moment. Her grip on him tightens as she remembers their childhood. To him, this is immensely more intimate than her hand on his thigh under the table.

"You and me," she says. She pauses, like she is tasting and testing, considering and calculating. "You know, I know you wonder about my work. You wonder why I think it's none of your business."

He says nothing.

"You know that it is my business, and only yours if I decide to share it. Well—here's the thing. What would you say to being a team again, once in a while?"

He says nothing. He stops walking and she does too. He doesn't think that she is joking, but he waits.

"Fine, I'll say it! That's what you want from me, isn't it? How would you like to help me every so often?" A beat. "Sometimes, taking down some of these criminals would be a lot easier with a spot of competent help I can depend on. Plus, it's way more helpful to your father's goal than being a paper-pushing intern. And anyway, we've a history of working well together. It could be good."

He says, "Just like old times?"

She nods, she says, "Just like old times."

…

Metalbending had come to her later, when she was seven.

By that time, Lin had often felt that the earth was more alive to her than the rest of the world, but still metal had remained stubbornly cold and unresponsive. So dead, compared to the vibrant, effusive, extroverted earth so vast beneath her feet.

She had trained and trained. She had copied her mother in every way that she could think to. She had shouted at her herself, and her mother had shouted at her. There was a lesson that she needed to learn—metal was earth, but it was earth that had been changed utterly. It had been twisted and burnt and scalded and torn and rent and razed, had been subjected to such torture that it was almost unrecognisable. For hundreds of years, people had not been able to recognise the earth in metal.

Then Lin got a fever. It wasn't fatal, but it may as well have been, the way it had taken her out of the world for a time.

And when she returned, she could manipulate metal. What had once been so cold and dead to her before, became alive for her, now as warm and viscerally familiar as her mother's skin.

…

Lin is undercover.

Currently she is an escort, clad in a dress that makes her breasts larger than she has ever seen them, and she is acting in a manner that would make her quite unrecognisable to anyone who has ever spent more than ten seconds around her. Though she is scantily dressed, she has done her best to stay in her cloak whenever she can, for under it she has concealed her cables for metalbending. Her client is a notorious earthbending triad boss who is to be tried for at least four murder. He is also suspected to have buried an unknown number of people alive. Her job is to get him to confess to anything, or bring him in.

And now they are coming back from dinner.

"You don't say," she says, giggling, flattening herself up against his side. In particular she is sure that her chest is pressed against his forearm. She is almost walking sideways to keep up with him. "Why would anyone think to challenge you?"

"They simply don't realise what they're up against," the boss says, looking down at her. He is leering at her.

Something pricks at the base of her neck, but she successfully smiles through it. "Idiots."

"The whole lot of them, bird. So fucking foolish." He clutches her chin, wretches her head to the side and back as a show of sizing her up. Then, astonishingly tender, he strokes a finger around the shell of her ear. "As foolish as a slut, but at least you're pretty."

Lin titters, pushing away, forcing herself to keep her character. _Though by now, even the most desperate woman would realise this old man is dangero__us, _"Hey, knock that off, you." She leans in, lowers her voice to a murmur, "You're the one who chose me."

"I wonder," he says dangerously soft, his words a sharpened blade wrapped in silk that caresses down along her cheek and jaw to the hollow of her shoulder.

She shivers, she recoils, she tries to respond but before she can manage he pulls her along. Keeping her form getting proper footing on her teetering heels, he drags her along from the footpath still heavy with the evening crowd down onto a side street. He takes a turn left, sweeps her around a right, and she no longer knows where she is. Before she can get her bearings, though, he slams her between him and a back alley wall.

He covers her mouth before she can get her breath. And, she realises, he has managed to pin her arms between them.

"If I say you're a slut, you'll be a slut, do you understand me? That's what I paid you for," he says, wedging a knee right up between her thighs. "That's what escorts do. Or, did you not know that?"

She struggles to free her hands. Not quite to her full true strength yet, for she _has_ to keep her character. It is not only for her job, it could mean her life at this point.

"I think it's the second one, honestly. I don't think you know how to properly do this job," he says as he slips his free hand down along her thigh, his fingers up her dress, under her thin underwear, into her slit. The rustling of silk on silk and skin on skin and silent whimpers is all that fills the alley. Eventually, he pulls his hand up and examines it in front of her face. "See? Not even wet."

Voiceless, she shakes her head.

"I know this isn't your real job, bird. I know who you really are," he says. He lowers and lowers his voice, he grinds her into the wall, presses down on her until all that she is is caught between his hissing and rough brick. Her head pounds, her head aches, her heart is about to explode between them. "Do you really think I'm that stupid, Miss Lin Beifong? Your whore of a mother wasn't able to stop me. It took her little police force this long to even find me. And now she can't stop me from killing her little bitch, thanks to that rogue Yakone."

That does it.

Switching to herself, Lin bites his hand through his glove and forces herself forward from the wall. She tastes leather and metal, her blood or possibly his. It's only for a trice that he flinches and swears a string of curses that swell and fill the alley, but it is enough for her to free her hands and swiftly pull away from the majority of his weight. Unable to knee him in his vital region, she elbows him in the face and hears something crack.

He goes down. She staggers too because he is so close to her that parts of them are tangled up and caught and she is dragged down before she can extricate herself. She kicks at his head. She kicks at his stomach. She kicks her shoes off. She bends her knees and braces and aims to bend the metal spools she has tried to keep on her right side, for she is as right-hand dominant as her mother was.

And, just then, the earth opens to swallow her up to her knees. She is viciously silenced by a stone gag that curves and locks right around her head. Her arms are pinioned by earth behind her back.

"I'm an earthbender, too, you know," he says as he pulls himself up. At his full height, he is nearly twenty centimeters taller. "And I've got at least forty years on you. Do you know how long that is? Your renowned mother barely managed to live that long."

He sinks her down to her waist, right up to the spooled metal buckled around her hips. "Your mother was a genius bender, but she wasn't quite as bright when it came to design. Those little toys of yours have a fatal flaw, you know. Several, actually, if you want the truth." He grabs her hair that she has styled to flow around her head, he twists until the pressure must be scalding her scalp. She twitches, she watches him through watering, widening eyes.

"Would you like to listen to me? For one thing, it's obvious to anyone with a brain when you're going to metalbend those contraptions, and you tend to bend only one at a time. For another, it leaves you little more ready to fight than a sitting turtleduck, for if someone stops that _one_ wire, you don't have enough time to earthbend a real defense. Honestly, it's quite endearing."

The earth clenches around her legs, thighs, hips, it is a great strong maw crushing down around her.

Screaming silently, Lin's arms burst from their bonds and she twists. She bends her mother's metal up at this man, drives her fury into her two wires that do fly true—

Until their trajectory is bent, and they both bury themselves into her right cheek.

The right side of her face suddenly no longer exists. Now there is only numbness there, and a faint, irritating trickling.

Of course, she's not the only one who's able to metalbend. She will have to tell them to look out, he can manipulate metal too. Didn't anyone know about that?

She sinks into the earth up to her chest. The blood pouring down must make her slick and sleek, for she slides right down to her chin. She thinks that she thinks, _I'm wet now. _The ground joins with the earth around her mouth and head, which leaves only the top portion of her head above the earth, only her sixth and seventh chakras are left in the world.

The earth is crushing her.

He is above her.

And rest is darkness that melts away around her.

She sees blackness, and redness, she sees her mother training a little girl who once was her, she sees the earth that once was her cradle and will be her cradle soon, she his smile as he rises to strike her one last time. He is aiming for her skull. Then she sees his smile change to a grimace, she sees him fall down and she doesn't understand it. Why it is happening now as it does. She is delirious from a shock that bleeds her of her thoughts and blends them together into patterns she cannot comprehend.

What she sees next is just as confusing—she can't hear him over the baseline of her heartbeat in her head or the myriad sounds the earth is feeding to her, but she sees Tenzin above her. She sees him saying her name, coming for her, trying to reach her before what little is left is taken away too. She tastes dirt and a metallic smear that is possibly her blood.

She listens for her mother and does not hear her.

Lin is drowning.


End file.
